Meet the Gallerists Trading White Cubes for Unconventional Architecture https://ift.tt/zouvIbG

Entering the “white cube” of a contemporary art gallery is like entering a liminal state. Artworks appear to float free of context, stripped bare from the noise of the outside world.

Though the term itself entered the art world lexicon in 1976 with critic Brian O’Doherty’s three-part Artforum essay titled “Inside the White Cube,” the proliferation of these spaces runs concurrent with the rise of modern art.

Vienna’s Secession Building was one of the first major sites to incorporate white walls in the last gasp of the 19th century. It paved the way for the Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural director, Alfred Barr, to standardize the hue upon the museum’s opening in New York City in 1929—a move that turned the white cube into an institutional staple.

This design remains the orthodoxy nearly a century later—for good reason. The neutrality of these cubes focuses the viewer’s attention solely on the work, allowing for deeper reflection. It’s also very easy to replicate anywhere in the world, as long as you have enough white paint and bright lights.

This staging—now ubiquitous across the art world—offers familiarity, but it also inspires rigidity. Within a rapidly shifting industry, a growing crop of gallerists is bucking the trend, moving from the ease of a white cube to complex narratives staged within unconventional architecture.

From a former tenement building in Hong Kong to an 18th-century Hamptons farmhouse, the character and history of the buildings are becoming just as important as the works that appear within them.

These imperfect environments alter how works are staged. In London, two young galleries present congruent case studies in balancing convention with experimentation. Helen Neven’s namesake gallery in East London occupies a disused taxi office across the road from the Young V&A museum, the result of a hunt for “somewhere with a history and character that might leak through a little,” she explained to Artsy.

Accessible via a heavy steel door set below the last vestiges of the old cab business’s faded lettering, the interior is punctuated by odd recesses and mismatched ceiling heights that disrupt the ideal of cubic perfectionism.

In northwest London, meanwhile, Chilli Gallery founder Aubrey Higgin created two distinct exhibition spaces within a former Japanese restaurant: The ground floor, with its wall of windows and large footprint, serves as the more conventional area, while the tiled, labyrinthine basement (formerly used as the kitchen) provides a more peculiar curatorial playground.

“Both draw out different dialogues,” Chilli’s assistant director, Max Rumbol, told Artsy. In a show earlier this year, “Split Studies,” Willa Cosinuke’s tessellated paintings—made of a series of interlocking panels—played off the basement’s discordant surfaces, including a metal security shutter.

While some galleries have embraced the grain of these commercial roots, others have taken a softer turn. In both the rustic 18th-century farmhouse of Amagansett’s Galerie Sardine and the former private home of Francis Gallery founder Rosa Park in Los Angeles, shows are imbued with a familial intimacy.

“The white cube is an extraordinary tool for focus, but it can also create a kind of distance,” Galerie Sardine co-founder Valentina Akerman told Artsy. “In a domestic setting, the work instead shares space with books, tables—signs of everyday life. Rather than diminishing the work, that context can deepen the relationship; the art becomes perhaps less monumental, more intimate, but also more present.”

Park echoed this observation. “People tend to feel far more at ease coming to see work in a home than in a white cube—even when it’s the same gallery putting on the show,” she told Artsy. “There’s perhaps a touch of voyeurism in it too: a curiosity about how others live, how a space is inhabited.”

Though Francis Gallery’s permanent location is on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, Park is perhaps best known for her residential concepts; alongside a handful of shows in her own Spanish Colonial home last year, which enforced a strict “no social media” policy, she’s also recently staged a presentation of John Zabawa’s paintings in late artist Richard Neutra’s modernist VDL Research House in L.A.

This pivot from sterility to domesticity is, in some ways, a homecoming for the art world. During the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century, a booming middle class emerged, and art production exploded as families filled their homes with art—an activity once reserved solely for the elite. While the white cube may be the de facto way to exhibit works in many galleries and institutions today, art has also always existed outside this model.

Salons, which affix as many works as possible onto a wall, have operated since the first official Paris Salon in 1667, while nomadic, pop-up galleries in homes and empty shopfronts have offered a cost-effective means of showing and selling art for decades. Still, the accelerant spurring a fresh wave of cube-free spaces traces back, like many things, to the pandemic.

After an industry-disrupting pause that forced art to be consumed through screens (its own kind of liminal white cube), gallerists are responding to an appetite for a more participatory relationship with art; one that embraces, rather than eliminates, context. When husband-and-wife duo Lorraine Kiang and Edouard Malingue of Kiang Malingue began converting a ’60s-era tenement building into their new Hong Kong headquarters in 2022, context was elemental.

Alongside Beau Architects, they stripped back the storied building to its foundations, preserving its history while reimagining what the site could offer. Two floors of the six-story building were removed to create a stack of concrete, double-height galleries.

A windowless white-cube zone, meanwhile, provides a touch of the traditional, and a library, tea area, and rooftop terrace retain some of the structure’s heritage.

Together, these elements reflect a balanced push to respond to the moment. “The public is expecting more than a sales pitch. It’s not enough for a work to be ‘cool’ and ‘going up in value.’ No one believes this in the current market,” Malingue told Artsy.

“The public is looking for a more unique, meaningful experience. A domestic space in a cherished neighborhood is part of the answer.”

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$17.9 million Raja Ravi Varma painting sets new record for Indian painting at auction. https://ift.tt/BaiJVFN

Raja Ravi Varma’s Yashoda and Krishna (ca. 1890s) sold for ₹1.67 billion rupees ($17.9 million) at the Saffronart auction in Delhi on April 1st, becoming the most expensive painting to sell at auction by an Indian artist. It was sold to pharmaceutical billionaire Cyrus Poonawalla, founder of the Serum Institute of India. (All figures include fees.)

Yashoda and Krishna portrays a tender scene in which the Hindu deity Krishna hugs his foster mother, Yashoda, as she milks a cow. The young Krishna stands in waiting with a small golden cup, with a playful yet impatient look on his face.

Varma, born in 1848, is considered one of the pioneers of modern Indian painting. He is perhaps best known for his realistic depictions of scenes from the Mahabharata and Ramayana, two of Hinduism’s most famous epic poems. Varma achieved international stature during his lifetime, notably securing an award at the 1873 Vienna Exhibition and later winning two gold medals at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

“Varma’s genius lies in this very balance: the sacred rendered through the familiar,” The Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation wrote of Yashoda and Krishna on its Instagram. “The textures of silk, the gleam of jewelry, the softness of skin, and the gentle stillness of the cow together create a scene that is both devotional and intimate.”

Varma’s previous auction record was set in 2023, when another painting of the same Yashoda and Krishna scene, Yashoda Krishna (n.d.) sold for $4.5 million at Pundole’s auction house in Mumbai.

Varma is one of just nine artists designated “national art treasures” by the official government Indian Art and Antiquities Act of 1972, meaning that works by these artists cannot travel overseas. Other artists include Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Gaganendranath Tagore, Amrita Sher-Gil, Jamini Roy, Nandalal Bose, Nicholas Roerich, and Sailoz Mookherjea.

Before this sale, the most expensive Indian painting at auction was M.F. Husain’s Untitled (Gram Yatra) (1954), which sold for $13.75 million at Christie’s New York in March 2025. Before that, the record was held by Hungarian Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil’s The Story Teller (1937), which sold for $7.4 million at Saffronart in Mumbai in September 2023.

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Jeff Koons unveils new collaboration with French water brand Evian. https://ift.tt/XoVY0eB

Jeff Koons and French spring water brand Evian have unveiled a new water bottle collaboration. The announcement, made April 1st, is genuinely not an April Fool’s prank.

To celebrate the water company’s 200th anniversary, Koons designed a specialty bottle featuring images of his iconic “Balloon Dog” sculptures. Evian, the luxury water brand founded in 1827, released still and sparkling varieties of the collaboration. Both bottles read “200 Years Young: Jeff Koons” beneath the logo. The still version features a pink balloon dog, while the sparkling water is adorned with a blue balloon dog.

Koons debuted his “Balloon Dog” in 1994. The first iteration was part of his “Celebration” series, which featured some 20 massive sculptures of balloon animals, inflatable animals, and easter eggs, among other party-associated ephemera. He made several more over the years. These are among the most in-demand artworks ever made. Balloon Dog (Orange) (1994–2000), for instance, sold for $58.4 million at Christie’s in 2023, the fifth most expensive artwork sold by a living artist at auction.

“When Evian approached me, the message about youth immediately resonated with me,” Koons said in a press statement. “I chose to incorporate my ‘Balloon Dog’ into the design because it not only echoes the iconic status of the brand itself, but also embodies the spirit of celebration, playfulness, curiosity, and the joy of creating, a moment that feels both life-giving and uplifting.”

Evian also released a photoshoot featuring its brand ambassador to commemorate the 200th anniversary. In one image, Koons sits on a pink Evian crate, surrounded by Spanish tennis player Carlos Alcaraz, British tennis player Emma Raducanu, American tennis player Frances Tiafoe, and French golfer Céline Boutier. The setting is the French Alps, where the titular Evian spring is located.

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American sculptor Melvin Edwards dies at 88. https://ift.tt/bIqMzT9

American sculptor Melvin Edwards, known for his Minimalist works that incorporate industrial materials to confront and interrogate the history of violence in the United States, died in Baltimore at 88 on March 29th. His gallery, Alexander Gray Associates, confirmed his passing.

Edwards is perhaps best known for his “Lynch Fragments,” a series of steel sculptures that use metal chains, pipes, barbed wire, beams, and hooks to evoke the history of social, physical, and geopolitical violence. The titles of his works often signaled the artist’s subject matter, such as Nam (1973), featured in the Memorial Art Gallery in New York, or Justice for Tropic-Ana (dedicated to Ana Mendieta) (1986), featured in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art.

Born in Houston in 1937, Edwards expressed an early interest in art. His father, an amateur artist, gifted him a painting easel when he was 14 years old. Most of his childhood was spent in Texas, and he moved to San Diego in 1955 for Navy Reserve training before relocating to Los Angeles two weeks later. There, he played football at Los Angeles City College and the University of Southern California, from which he graduated with a bachelor’s in painting in 1965.

Before graduating from USC, Edwards married painter Karen Hamre, with whom he would have three children. That same year, the artist learned to weld, a technique that would come to define the most important artworks of his career. In 1963, Edwards began the “Lynch Fragments” series with the wall-mounted sculpture Some Bright Morning. The inaugural work, which draws its title from publisher and writer Ralph Ginzburg’s 1962 book 100 Years of Lynching, features a chain made from several amalgamated pieces of battered steel. The series ranged from small works, measuring a foot long, to massive, imposing sculptures up to eight feet—all of which were equally arresting.

Edwards moved to New York City in 1967, where he immersed himself in the Minimalist and abstract art scenes, befriending artists like Sam Gilliam and William T. Williams. In 1970, the artist staged a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The very next year, the artist withdrew work from a museum group show after the institution refused to include his essay criticizing its history of sidelining Black artists.

Despite finding early success at some of the most prestigious institutions, including the Walker Art Center and The Studio Museum in Harlem, Edwards did not secure a commercial gallery show until 1990 with New York’s CDS Gallery. Meanwhile, the artist was on the faculty of Rutgers University from 1972 to 2002.

In recent years, Edwards has earned widespread recognition. In 2021, the artist installed major sculptures in New York’s City Hall Park, including Song of the Broken Chains (2021) and Homage to Coco (2021). In 2015, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Texas mounted his retrospective. Meanwhile, Alexander Gray Associates has regularly shown the artist’s work since 2010, with his latest solo exhibition in 2024.

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How Hajime Sorayama’s Sexy Robots Reflect Our Fantasies https://ift.tt/tY1ogjm

For nearly 50 years, Japanese artist Hajime Sorayama has developed a singular practice with his “Sexy Robots” at the center. These chrome-plated women figures feature impossibly smooth, reflective bodies that mirror viewers and their surroundings. The artist first rendered them in painstaking airbrush, then began sculpting them in mirror-polished aluminum and stainless-steel sculptures. In the mid-2010s, he made them life-sized via digital modeling and collaborations with engineers and production studios.

Sorayama’s robots have reverberated across the worlds of pop culture, luxury fashion, and streetwear. Museums have embraced the artist, who is nevertheless distrustful of taste and global acclaim. “I hate academism,” he told Artsy. “I hate authority.”

This spring, Sorayama is enjoying a sprawling retrospective at Creative Museum Tokyo in Kyobashi. In Toranomon, his work is on view in the massive “Ghost in the Shell” group exhibition at Tokyo Node. Sorayama’s iconoclasm only contributes to his global appeal.

Inside Hajime Sorayama’s Tokyo studio

The Creative Museum retrospective is titled “SORAYAMA: Light, Reflection, Transparency,” nodding to what Sorayama calls the three basic elements of his practice. He’s uninterested in stylistic labels. “I wouldn’t say it is photorealism nor superrealism,” he said. “People tend to put me in that box…That interpretation is not my aesthetic.”

The show is enormous and spectacular, with a huge retail space attached, akin to a luxury brand concession in a department store. Fans can buy Sorayama merch then have lunch in a separate Sorayama bar and café under the same roof. The setup itself feels like another, futuristic universe where you can buy, eat, and look around Sorayama’s brain.

Yet Sorayama’s studio is a much more humble, intimate affair. For more than 40 years, the artist has worked out of a bland apartment building a few minutes’ walk from Tokyo’s Gotanda Station. An enormous, painted femme fatale sprawls across his ceiling. Below, the space teems with chrome figurines, dangling sketches, erotic statuettes, books, clipped reference images, lamps, brushes, bottles, toys, and half-finished ideas. His desk looks less like a workstation than a crowded cockpit of a private mythology.

The current retrospective in fact includes a recreation of Sorayama’s desk and office space, folding his process into the presentation of his work. The space’s density and its evidence of fetishistic accumulation are inseparable from the art it produces.

The artist himself is boyish and warm, quick to make a joke. My interpreter explained that the artist is in fact very shy. The artist’s mixture of mischief and reserve helps explain why tenderness and alert, amused sensuality undergird the hard gleam of his surfaces.

Early career

Sorayama was born in Ehime, Japan, in 1947. He trained as an illustrator and began working as a freelancer in 1972. His career as the patron saint of chrome desire began six years later, when he received an advertising commission from Suntory Whisky. The brief was to produce a robot image, since the brand couldn’t secure rights to use the Star Wars character they wanted. The origin story explains Sorayama’s inimitable style, which blends commercial sleekness with erotic futurism. From the beginning, robots appealed as extensions of the body.

Untitled, 2022
Hajime Sorayama
Curator Cove

RAFALE, 2017
Hajime Sorayama
Dope! Gallery

A few years later, the artist gave his robotic figures an erotic edge. In 1983, he published Sexy Robot, a book of illustrations that featured hyper-sexualized female androids, rendered with fetishistic precision. The trope took off, inspiring sexy cyborg imagery across pop culture on a global scale. Penthouse caught on and began publishing his drawings into the mid-1990s.

Across Sorayama’s Tokyo retrospective, such figures recur across airbrushed paintings, hallways lined with chrome sculptures, and digital animations. Sorayama’s Suntory ad is included in the show, alongside his 1999 AIBO (autonomous robotic pet dogs) for Sony, one of which is now in MoMA’s collection; cover art for Aerosmith’s 2001 album Just Push Play; fashion collaborations; giant sculptures; and newer immersive installations.

Sorayama never disowned his commercial origins. In fact, he keeps returning to the same proposition: Beauty can be manufactured, and machinery can be sensual.

Mainstream acclaim and fashion collaborations

Sorayama’s work is too perverse for polite design, too commercial for art purists, too technically serious to be dismissed as mere style. This appealing instability has led to both major museum attention and collaborations with sneaker and luxury menswear brands.

Institutions including Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, Singapore’s ArtScience Museum, and The Jewish Museum in New York all showed his work in the 2010s, placing his work firmly in the realm of contemporary art. In addition to MoMA, his pieces are included in major permanent collections such as the Smithsonian and the U.S. Library of Congress.

In 2019, Sorayama created a monumental mirrored robot for the Dior runway and supplied robotic imagery for the house’s garments. Designers Stella McCartney and Juun.J have also integrated his robotic figures into capsule collections. Streetwear brands BAPE and XLARGE have embraced him, as well as Puma sneakers. Formula One racing star Lewis Hamilton worked with Sorayama to create a sleek helmet and apparel for his +44 brand.

“In a way, I’m more of an entertainer rather than an artist,” Sorayama said. He is less invested in art history than in producing images with emotional voltage. He understands that luxury and fetish share a language: finish, touch, shine, precision, desire.

Sorayama makes no hierarchical distinction between his embrace by museums and by youth culture: “I don’t think there is a mainstream. It doesn’t exist,” he said.

Controversies in Sorayama’s work

Sorayama’s art explicitly objectifies women. The breasts are polished, the waists cinched, the legs often open, the high heels sharpened into weapons. His universe is full of flagrant male fantasy, for which he doesn’t apologize. “Sex is a celebration of life,” he said.

SEXY ROBOT 1/3 scale Aluminium B, 2018
Hajime Sorayama
AYNAC Gallery

Sexy Robot Floating 1/4 Scale (Silver), 2020
Hajime Sorayama
The BlackWood Gallery

Sorayama’s metallic figures invoke bronze and marble sculpture, pinup art, industrial design, car culture, bondage gear, classical statuary, manga, and religious iconography. This sophisticated mélange and the work’s clear artifice perhaps saves his work from cancellation. About his chrome women, he said: “Up until now, I paint or draw them as goddesses.”

There’s never, in fact, been sustained backlash to Sorayama’s hypersexual, fetishistic, and BDSM-adjacent work. In fact, Sorayama’s most significant dust-up was over authorship. In late 2023, Sorayama publicly suggested that Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour visuals had borrowed from his imagery without permission.

Even that episode speaks to how thoroughly Sorayama’s visual language has entered the culture. Critics and interviewers have certainly described the work as pornographic and “controversial,” but calls of sexism lag behind applause.

Shift into monumental sculpture and immersive spectacle

Sorayama’s work has gradually grown more ambitious. In 2019, he unveiled an aluminum, 36-foot-long Tyrannosaurus Rex at Bangkok’s Central Embassy, an upscale mall and hotel complex. It was part of an outdoor installation called SORAYAMA Space Park, a collaborative work with Azuma Makoto of the Japanese art duo AMKK.

Two years later, Sorayama further delved into prehistorical forms with his exhibition “Dinosauria” at NANZUKA 2G gallery in Shibuya, Japan. The show featured paintings, sculptures, and of course merch: this time, a collaboration with UNIQLO.

At Tokyo Node, Sorayama presents a gleaming take on Ghost in the Shell, the influential Japanese cyberpunk manga-anime franchise which imagines a world where minds and machines fuse. Its heroine, Motoko Kusanagi, is a powerful cyborg operative whose body has become a defining image of posthuman culture; Sorayama has rendered her in gleaming metal, with metal tubes and threads protruding from her back and skull. These sculptures get an entire hall of their own, facing the landmark Tokyo Tower.

This show and the retrospective confirm that Sorayama has built one of the most recognizable visual languages of the last half-century. He understood that the future would be sold to us as a surface: sexy, frictionless, metallic, and impossible to stop looking at.

Even now, Sorayama’s imagery turns up in locales where glamour slides back into vice. Since 2018, the Shibuya “gentlemen’s club” Madam Woo—a deliberately overripe hybrid of neo-Tokyo fantasy and Las Vegas striptease—has integrated Sorayama’s chrome “Sexy Robot” dancers into its logo and merch.

If Sorayama has secured his spot in the canon, his art still belongs to nightlife, fetish, spectacle, and the charged edge between seduction and bad taste. “I personally love chaos,” he said. “I will never become mainstream. I will always be guerrilla.”

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Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” may leave Madrid for the first time in more than 30 years. https://ift.tt/ocD8E7k

Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), considered one of the Spanish artist’s masterpieces, might travel to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2026. This week, Catalan-language newspaper Ara reported that the Basque regional government petitioned Spain’s Ministry of Culture to authorize a loan for the painting, to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica, or in Basque, Gernika. If approved, it would be the first time the painting has left Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid since 1992.

The Basque government’s proposal calls for Guernica to be on view at the Guggenheim from October 2026 to June 2027. The head of the regional government, Imanol Pradales, told Ara that featuring the painting would act as “a formula for symbolic reparation and historical memory” for the Basque people. Meanwhile, the Basque leader underscored that it would be a “message to the world” about “what war entails and the atrocity that derives from dictatorships.”

Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 following the Nazi and Italian fascist bombing of the Basque city; Spanish Nationalist general Francisco Franco requested the offensive from his allies during the Spanish Civil War. The 11-by-25-foot canvas is a vehement anti-war statement. It captures the horrors of the bombing as it depicts screaming figures and fractured animals in the artist’s signature Cubist style. Picasso unveiled the painting at the World’s Fair that same year. It then lived in the Museum of Modern Art from 1939 to 1981, as Picasso requested that the painting not return to Spain until Franco’s dictatorship ended. Before it was housed at the Reina Sofía, the painting hung at the Prado Museum for 11 years.

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao requested the painting to be moved once before, in 1997, for its opening. Additionally, Barcelona’s municipal government once asked for its transfer. However, the museum has repeatedly refused to move the painting. Last Thursday, the Reina Sofia released a statement about conservation concerns, noting that transferring is “strongly discouraged,” as reported by Ara.

The Guernica transfer request carries political undertones. Two Basque nationalist parties have raised the Guernica move with the Spanish government. Both parties support Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s current administration; the politician might lose crucial votes if he does not support their campaign. Basque government councilor Ibone Bengoetxea told Ara that the decision is “not technical” but rather a “political decision.”

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How Latinx Artists Are Redefining Contemporary American Painting https://ift.tt/sb8mKoZ

The group exhibition “Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way,” on view at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York, through September 6th, explores how contemporary Latinx artists have reshaped and subverted traditional painting genres in recent years. Their aesthetic innovations respond to shifting cultural narratives, government policies that demonize the Latinx diaspora, and their long exclusion from mainstream art history.

The show features 58 artists who approach painting as a flexible language. Some challenge the boundaries of the medium through unexpected materials, while others take distinct approaches to European traditions like landscape, portraiture, and still life. The exhibition will travel to the Des Moines Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Phoenix Art Museum, and the Frye Art Museum in Seattle.

A bold new survey of Latinx painting

The curator, Andrea Alvarez, who has previously curated Latinx-focused shows like “Comunidades Visibles: The Materiality of Migration” from 2021, calls the exhibition the “boldest statement” of her career. “It is a declaration that we as Latinx people are here, that we take up space, that we are part of the dialogue of what is happening in contemporary art and in the contemporary world, and that it merits attention,” she said during the preview of the show. “More broadly, it means that all those individuals who have experienced displacement, who have migrated around the world, whose worldviews are shaped by those experiences, also deserve to be seen and represented in spaces like these.”

Alvarez emphasizes that the show is not a survey but aims to “think about Latinx painting in expansive ways,” and to “expand the disciplines that have been inherited and passed down to us from the European and white American traditions.” The exhibition is split into thematic sections, although many of the works could easily move between them. The paintings all fall under what Alvarez calls Pinturx, or the “Latinx lens” on “traditional, European-approved” genres of painting. The Chicano poet Juan Felipe Herrera, whose 2008 poem gives the exhibition its title, wrote an epic 68-page poem in response to the show that is excerpted throughout the galleries as a conceptual guide.

In line with Alvarez’s expansive curatorial approach, some of the included artworks are not paintings at all. Some reimagine folk and craft traditions, like Justin Favela’s St. Maarten (1972), After Marisol (2025–26), a mural made with the colored tissue paper often used to make piñatas. The piece references a seascape by the Venezuelan American artist Marisol, who features prominently in the museum’s collection. It continues Favela’s decades-long exploration of the piñata style, which he began as a student in protest of his professors urging him to make work about his Mexican Guatemalan heritage.

“No one else was being asked to do that,” Favela said. “I thought to make a symbol representing Latinidad that would be so corny they would think I was making fun of the art world. But the piñata has so many layers—it’s about celebration, it’s about destruction. It automatically ties into Latino culture in the United States and everybody understands what that symbol means.” He added that the inclusion of the work in a prestigious institution is also significant, since “a lot of gallerists and professors told me I would never get into museums using tissue paper.”

Political themes in Latinx painting

Some paintings in the exhibition address the plight of migrants crossing the United States border. Karla Diaz’s Uncle’s Crossing (2022) depicts the artist’s late uncle, who worked as a coyote, or someone paid to bring migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border. The work comes from her “Coyote” series, which Diaz says she began after her uncle’s death, as his profession, and the possible legal ramifications of speaking out about it, was a taboo subject in her household.

Other works deal with how the Latinx diaspora assimilates, like Guadalupe Maravilla’s Pupusa Retablo (2023), in which a small retablo, or devotional painting, framed by found objects, illustrates the artist’s migration from El Salvador to the United States in the 1980s. At eight years old, Maravilla traveled alone to the Texas border as he fled the Salvadoran Civil War. His vignette recounts an episode in Honduras when a woman flagged him as a migrant for eating pupusas with his hands rather than a fork and knife, as is the custom in the region. He feared he’d be sent back.

Some works consider the effects of imperialism and the exploitation of people and nature. Gamaliel Rodríguez’s painting Evolved Cavendish (2022) speaks to the slave trade in the Caribbean. Its subject is a rotting cavendish banana tree, a high-carb crop brought to Puerto Rico under Spanish colonial rule to feed enslaved people. Rodríguez uses the plant, which appears to be consumed with fungus, to draw parallels to Spanish colonization and consider how Puerto Rico has “changed and evolved” over the centuries, the artist said.

In addition, Angel Otero addresses the effects of climate change on Latinx communities in the large-scale painting Constellation (2024), which shows his grandmother’s couch suspended on a swing set and submerged in waves. The piece critiques the United States’s response to the widely destructive Hurricane Maria and the “ways in which memories and cultural heritage can be washed away by natural disasters,” Alvarez said.

Other works have socioeconomic undertones, like Kristopher Raos’s hard-edge painting Untitled (No Escaping the Housework, All Temperature!) (2023), which depicts fragments of a detergent box painted in geometric color fields, reflecting on the visual markings of domestic labor in Latinx communities with a Pop art–like quality. Raos likens the “methodical process of labor” to artistic process. No one can “conceptualize how much goes into a work,” he said.

Alfonso Gonzalez Jr, a self-taught artist who previously worked as a commercial billboard painter, presents the striking Abogados Tierra Caliente (Billboard) (2024), a work mounted on a steel post in the style of a billboard. It reflects ads he saw in East Los Angeles for service providers like insurance companies and injury lawyers that very blatantly conveyed Latinx tropes and targeted Latinx communities.

Buffalo AKG’s monumental commission and more intimate work

rafa esparza’s monumental Tratos (2025–26), commissioned specifically for the exhibition, is a six-panel painting on adobe blocks that is supported by a steel armature. On the back, the artist has created an assemblage that partly comprises a mangled American flag and laid adobe blocks on the floor.

The central image references a photograph of the 1997 Acteal massacre in Chiapas, Mexico, showing Indigenous women confronting soldiers. esparza adds collaged elements of ICE raids in Los Angeles and Chicago, drawing parallels between the atrocities. The figures’ arms are tattooed with symbols showing images like the Florentine Codex, a 16th-century manuscript documenting the culture and religion of the Aztec in early colonial Mexico, the Aztecs fleeing from Spaniards, and other scenes.

“I was thinking about drawing a painting showing a continuum of violence that’s colonial [and] that comes from globalization,” esparza said. “The look on the soldier’s face—a mortified look—said so much that I couldn’t draw a better expression. I was interested not only in state-sanctioned agreements but also in the personal agreements we make with one another as community members [and] people who care for each other. That image carries a lot of betrayal. There’s a heavy tension.”

Other works speak to the power of family and community, like Larry Madrigal’s Man on Trampoline (2023), which depicts an everyday scene rendered with the grandeur of Old Masters paintings. Madrigal’s figures ascend in midair and frenetically topple over one another as they conjure the balance and chaos of family life. The work references El Greco’s Resurrection (circa 1596–1600) to “amplify this sense of epic importance” that, at the same time, was “just a moment of play,” he said. Madrigal moved from Los Angeles to Phoenix as a child, where he said the cookie-cutter houses that stretched across the Southwestern landscape could have felt alienating were it not for his family’s deep bond and their connections with Latinx culture and community.

The complicated meaning of “Latinx”

In the process of organizing this sweeping exhibition, Alvarez acknowledged that the term “Latinx” has been widely contested and misunderstood since it was introduced in the early 2000s as a gender-neutral alternative. Some argue that it does not fit naturally in Spanish and that it imposes U.S. cultural politics on Spanish-speaking communities. Alvarez ultimately decided to use the term because it is widely accepted by Latin American art scholars at the moment, and language is ever-evolving.

“We use [Latinx] knowing that we stand on unstable ground as we use it,” she said. “And we, in some ways, are building the plane as we fly it. We use it as we critique it. We understand its complexities and the fraught histories that it carries with it, while also knowing its power and its ability to create a path forward, or forge a space for people. At this moment, we have not identified a better word. We use it knowing that it’s what we have, and we use it responsibly.”

Beyond their categorization as “Latinx artists,” the artists in this exhibition are united by a “deep sense of care and attention toward their work, toward their communities, and toward the histories they are engaging with,” Alvarez said. “Every gesture, every material choice, every word that they use when they talk about their work is not taken lightly. That’s very much shared across the board and something we can learn from.”

Browse more artworks from our Contemporary Latinx Voices collection.

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