Can you share the mission and vision behind the Latinx Project? What does the team aim to accomplish through its efforts and programming?
The Latinx Project at New York University explores and promotes U.S. Latinx art, culture and scholarship through creative and interdisciplinary programs. Founded in 2018, TLP serves as a platform to foster critical public programming and for hosting artists and scholars.
Through our work we are committed to examining and highlighting the multitude of Latinx identities as central to developing a more inclusive and equitable vision of Latinx Studies. This driving commitment shows up in all of our work, from panels and exhibitions to the Miriam Jiménez Román Fellowship which advances the study of Afro-Latinx communities in the U.S.
What factors do you consider when programming events for the community? Can you share part of your creative process for deciding the themes and topics for panel events, exhibitions, etc.?
As far as planning, each semester we meet with our faculty and faculty advisory board to think about our panels and learn about their particular research priorities or other themes that resonate collectively. Our exhibitions are shaped through open calls from artists and curators. We’re thrilled to welcome this year’s artists-in-residence Mildred Beltré and Estelle Maisonett and our guest curator Daniel Arturo Almeida. Their respective shows allow us to consider materiality, language, cultural extraction, and archaeology, among other themes.
When programming events or exhibitions, we think about creating spaces for community making and conversations that contribute to more complex and nuanced narratives about Latinx people and their experiences in the United States.
Could you provide some background on the inspiration and goals of the upcoming panel discussion on Independent Writers & Creative Cultural Equity? What can attendees and the broader creative community expect to learn or take away from the conversation?
This panel came from ongoing conversations in creative economies. At TLP we’re very concerned with issues of creative equity– it’s part of our mission, and with the writers' strike and layoffs in major newspaper outlets, we knew we wanted to feature this conversation.
Also, we wanted to uplift conversations among creatives about pay equity and how to respect creatives’ labor – and that’s why we invited Carina del Valle Schorske, who has been very open about this conversation on social media, to curate the panel.
Additionally, with our digital publication Intervenxions, we have been establishing networks with independent writers– and uplifting their central role as creatives, and critical thinkers in our community– and we wanted this panel to feature their work.
We hope that this panel inspires and fuels mobilization, organizing, and change and seeing all art, writing, and culture-making as labor, normalizing the need for new systems that compensate labor equitably.
Could you tell us about the current exhibition on view? What are the goals of the Artist in Residence (AIR) and Fellowship programs?
Allow Me to Gather Myself is currently on view on the fourth floor at 20 Cooper Square. Featuring works by artist-in-residence Mildred Beltré, the show is rooted in her experience as the daughter of Dominican migrants to New York City and in broader histories of mothers and daughters across the African diaspora creating and sharing knowledge. In November, we invite everyone to join us for a conversation between Beltré and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, whose exhibition Behold is on view at the Brooklyn Museum.
Our AIR program, the curatorial program, and Miriam Jiménez Román Fellowship offer resources to artists and scholars while also amplifying visibility of Latinx creativity and histories.
Since our founding, we’ve hosted seven artists-in-residence and fourteen exhibitions looking at everything from zines to community displacement to digital technologies and surveillance. At each intersection, it has offered an opportunity for students, faculty, artists, curators, activists and community members to meet and think together.
Is there anything else you would like to share with the Tisch community?
