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Latino - A Art - Race and The Illusion of Equality - Art21 Magazine
Latino - A Art - Race and The Illusion of Equality - Art21 Magazine
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magazine.art21.org/2016/06/20/latinoa-art-race-and-the-illusion-of-equality/#.YirrS3rMJPY 1/9
3/11/22, 1:29 AM Latino/a Art: Race and the Illusion of Equality | Art21 Magazine
How many artists of Basquiat’s background would make it in today’s art world?
or years, I have been writing about the works of Latino/a artists in a variety of media
F that focus on the construction and representation of their ethnic identities. This
investigation has led me to explore the commonalities and differences in the visual
representation of racially constructed Others more broadly, and I keep reaching the same conclusion: no
visual representation of people of color is ever innocent or powerful enough to challenge the socially
defined images that frame them—depending on the given illusion—as marginal, as threats, as
foreigners, as Others, as having too much culture or too little culture. On their own, artistic
representations can do little to challenge racism. It takes structural change to create a visual revolution
Though Latinos/as in America are hyper-visible in mainstream imaginations as stereotypes, icons, and
figments of social fears and projections, they are invisible as complex, artistic humans. Scores of cultural
critics tell us that this seemingly puzzling situation is the product of history. Long-enduring
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3/11/22, 1:29 AM Latino/a Art: Race and the Illusion of Equality | Art21 Magazine
representations born of racism and political disenfranchisement make it almost impossible to see beyond
the illusion, which presents every image of people of color within a rubric of race. This is why debates
over the relative merits of positive versus negative representations have proven so futile: any image that
ourselves on our diversity. Big wins—like the all- PEOPLE OF COLOR IS EVER
people-of-color cast of Hamilton nominated for the INNOCENT OR POWERFUL
most Tony nominations ever, and the high profiles of
ENOUGH TO CHALLENGE
select visual artists and curators of color in major
becomes more a terrain for financial speculation and an engine of growth for the much-hyped “creative
economy,” most observers admit that it has also grown less diverse and more unequal.
In particular, Latino/a art and artists are disregarded by both North American and Latin American art
history, institutions, and curators. Ignored by the White-centric North American art canon and the
nation-centric paradigms that dominate Latin American art, Latinos/as seem to fit nowhere. This erasure
continues despite historical efforts by Chicano/a, Nuyorican, and Latino/a art movements, advocates, and
institutions to challenge it through the creation of culturally specific art spaces and museums.
One classroom example forcefully makes the point that diversity, in the form of a greater breadth of
visual representations, is not the same as the lack of racism. In my seminar on ethnicity and media at
New York University, I ask students to search for Internet images using the phrase, “Latino art,”
following the lead of Nancy Parezo’s research on Native American art. Just as Parezo’s search exposed the
dominance of typically western landscapes and Native Americans depicted in an idyllic, mythical past,
searches for Latino/a art reveals the dominance of bright colors and imagery of the Day of the Dead and
Frida Kahlo. From the search results, one would think that Latino/a artists are all Mexican or only used
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3/11/22, 1:29 AM Latino/a Art: Race and the Illusion of Equality | Art21 Magazine
passionate colors. Most of my students immediately get the point, but, to highlight the complexity behind
clichéd representations, I push the exercise further, asking them to review past and present exhibitions in
local or national Latino/a art institutions, or to identify or interview a Latino/a artist they may know or
have heard about. Most importantly, this exercise always leads to a fruitful and revealing conversation
among my students, of whom a significant number are aspiring artists of color, ready to share the
IS NOT THE SAME AS THE mechanics of racism in the arts. Only through this
LACK OF RACISM. work can we go beyond the illusions that dominate our
that continues to diminish artists of color and their work to clichés and the rubric of identity politics,
which has entitled curators and critics to talk about Latino/a art and artists of color without authoritative
knowledge about the vocabularies, aesthetic traditions, backgrounds, and resources of these
artists. Racism is behind the unspoken practices that limit the hiring and recruitment of people of color as
professors and the admission of students in art schools, that see in them only clichés and illusions while
denying them universal access. In this context, art and artists of color are recognized only as
ethnographic subjects or as political statements to entertain the White liberal establishment; they are less
expensive but less valuable and less worthy of being shown than the White artists.
So let us not be fooled by the false illusions of equality that come from the hyper-visibility of marketable
and sanitized images of Latinos/as or by the occasional gain of a breakthrough artist or cultural
production. Latinos/as make up 17 percent of the US population, and it is estimated that by 2040
Latinos/as will be the majority minority of the country. But how many people of color were present at the
most recent art fair, museum opening, or master-of-fine-arts class? I doubt it was 17 percent, unless it
was an exhibition or performance produced by an artist of color. And even then they may still not be
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3/11/22, 1:29 AM Latino/a Art: Race and the Illusion of Equality | Art21 Magazine
CONTRIBUTOR
ARLENE DAVILA
Arlene Davila is a professor of anthropology and American studies at New York University. She
writes on Latino/a cultural politics; her multiple books include Latino Spin: Public Image and the
Whitewashing of Race (NYU, 2008).
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