An Incisive Exhibition in Buffalo Defies Expectations of What Latinx Painting Should Look Like 

There is a painting at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum that I still can’t get out of my head, six months after I saw it. It only measures 40 by 30 inches, and I missed it on my first walk through the gallery. Made by Los Angeles–based artist Karla Diaz in thinned-out acrylic paint, it shows two Latino men, both with mustaches, one carrying the other on his shoulders. The painting’s joyful casualness belies its subject matter, clues to which can be found in the coyote on one of the men’s shirts and in the work’s title, Uncle’s Crossing (2022).

Diaz depicted her late uncle, who was a coyote, or someone who helps undocumented people cross into the United States. The role of the coyote is controversial in Latinx communities, often regarded as a necessary evil: someone who may help you get into the US but exploit you along the way. Growing up, Diaz recalled, talking about her uncle’s job was taboo at home. “He would whisper, ‘Okay, I’m leaving for work,’ and I was like, ‘Okay, why are you whispering? You’re just going to work.’” At the time, she didn’t know exactly what job her uncle was leaving for; it was only later that she learned the truth.

Four years ago, shortly after her uncle passed away, Diaz was recovering from a stroke and had to relearn how to talk, walk, and paint. Throughout this rehabilitation, memories of her uncle returned to her. “It was a vulnerable time,” she said. “I’m the type of person, when something is very vulnerable and scary, instead of running away from it, I confront it. Even if that means putting myself in a space that is scary emotionally, I feel I can grow and learn a lot from it.”

She felt compelled to make this tender work because it was an image she had never seen before in art history: a portrait of a coyote. “In a way, it’s something that has been erased. It’s a controversial story to tell. I hope that people come with questions more than anything. I know that my uncle, in the most humane way of being able to do that, was trying to help people.”

The work, she added, asks “What does it mean to make taboo stories visible and tell others about them?”

Uncle’s Crossing features in “Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way,” which closes this weekend in Western New York. Painting surveys like “Let Us Gather,” which will soon depart on a national tour to Iowa, Phoenix, and Seattle, were once a standard feature of contemporary art museums, though they have recently fallen out of favor. The exhibition is an exciting intervention into the history of painting surveys, ambitious in scope yet thoughtfully executed in both its installation and its creation of new scholarship.

In focusing on one medium, Andrea Alvarez, the exhibition’s curator, wanted to explore “the breadth and the richness of that discipline—to reveal the richness of the Latinx population.”

Alvarez said she included works that most might not consider traditional paintings—oil or acrylic on canvas or linen—to “push the boundaries of what is painting and what that means today.” These range from Moises Salazar Tlatenchi’s Cruising Queens (2024), which imagines a queer version of Washington crossing the Delaware and features a crocheted frame; Manuela Gonzalez’s Inanna (2024), made of painted textiles sewn together into a diamond shape that reference the history of hard-edge abstraction and painters like Frank Stella and Mary Heilmann; and Nery Gabriel Lemus’s Querida Niña Migrante and This Is the Air We Breathe (both 2020), each consisting of 15 painted floor mats installed on the floor.

Works like these, Alvarez said, “resist the materiality of painting itself—what should and shouldn’t fine art be made out of. … Every single material choice is intentional and deliberate.” Speaking on an artist panel, Sarah Zapata, who contributed another textile-based work, said she welcomed her inclusion in the exhibition because “an important part of the lineage [of painting] is thinking about how textiles largely are the reason that painting exists.”

 “My hope is that what visitors take away is an experience of the richness, the diversity, and the complexity of what these artists are doing,” Alvarez said, and in doing so “they can also expand that in their mind to the population more broadly to understand that this population of the diaspora of Latinx people in the United States are similarly rich, culturally productive and diverse, and meritorious of all of this sort of celebration.”

Another legacy that Alvarez had to contend with is the perception of Latinx painting, more specifically the stereotypes that have historically been attached to it by outsiders: colorful, figurative, folkloric. “There are going to be people who walk through the exhibition with certain expectations that they will be surprised to see the breadth of work that they encounter,” she said. “But I didn’t see a lot of the artists still wrestling with that. It feels to me like a lot of the artists have liberated themselves from those historical obligations. The exhibition does do the work of undoing some of those stereotypes.”

Now curator at the Buffalo AKG, Alvarez joined the museum as a curatorial fellow in 2018 and shortly afterward began thinking about how she might introduce contemporary Latinx art to the people of Buffalo. After her promotion to assistant curator in 2021, she began planning the exhibition in earnest, conducting her initial studio visits across the country, from Los Angeles to Miami, Chicago to Phoenix, and Texas to Puerto Rico. “That’s when I started homing in on the discipline of painting,” she said. The museum’s deep holdings in 20th-century painting were also a plus, as frequent visitors might more easily begin to connect with the works on view.

“Let Us Gather” features 58 artists, though Alvarez could have included dozens more. “The question I asked myself over and over again is: Is this artist actively contributing to the discourse of what is contemporary Latinx painting?” As she continued her research, “I did start to observe shared concerns or interests among these different artists. In some cases, these artists weren’t in dialogue with one another—they might not even know each other’s work until this exhibition.”

These observations led Alvarez to organize the exhibition into seven themes, including “Identity/Place,” which looks at how the people who live in a place shape it and how, in turn, its topography shapes them, and “Pinturx,” a gender-neutral version of the Spanish word for “painter” that encompasses various genres of painting.

Each theme acts as its own microcosm of the overall exhibition’s approach, showcasing varied perspectives on a single topic. In the “Community” section, for example, artists including Aliza Nisenbaum, David Antonio Cruz, and Shizu Saldamando consider “community as a verb, community as a noun—different kinds of communities, whether those are blood relations or chosen family” and explore “the importance of community, in many cases, to marginalized groups for survival and thriving.”

Other artists subvert expectations of the themes, as illustrated by an abstraction by Eamon Ore-Giron featured in “(New) Histories,” which tackles the legacy of history painting; Kristopher Raos’s painted close-up of the Cheer laundry detergent logo in “Abstractions”; and still lifes by Salomón Huerta, featuring a gun paired with a glass of milk or a pink pan dulce, in “Bodies & Figures.” The latter works are actually portraits of the artist and his father, who each night would “take his revolver out of the holster, set it down on the table, and ask someone to bring him a snack,” according to Alvarez. “It’s a tender image actually that represents his father and the care that they had for one another.”

After settling on a final list in summer 2024, Alvarez felt it was important to involve the artists in selecting which of their works would be featured in the exhibition. Often, she explained, L.A.-based artists or artists from the Caribbean have shown together, but because artists from different places were going to be presented in the same galleries, “I wanted everyone to have a little bit more agency,” she said, noting that ultimately, as the curator, she did have the final say. “I wanted to hear what they had to say—I have my preferences; I have the works that have stuck out to me for whatever reason—but I wanted to know what’s more resonant for them.”

An example of this is also one of the largest works on view, Man on Trampoline (2023), by Larry Madrigal. Initially, artist and curator considered showing a selection of four or so smaller paintings before settling on this monumental canvas. Measuring 7.5 feet by 6.3 feet, it depicts a jumble of figures suspended in midair above the titular bouncing device, with the composition referencing El Greco’s The Resurrection (1597–1600) and the subject resembling something you’d see on America’s Funniest Home Videos. In blending these two sources, Madrigal said he aims to bring “humor, earnestness, and humanity—all in the painting.”

“His work is one that celebrates the improvised moments of family life—of a big family, a chaotic family—and what it feels like to be the father of a growing family,” Alvarez said. “It encapsulates all those elements [of community], while also still addressing the studied way the artist thinks about art history.”

Art history, meanwhile, factors broadly into the exhibition, too. “Painting has such a potent and undeniable history,” Alvarez said, connecting it not just to its primacy within the discipline but also how it was a tool of imperialist power in spreading aesthetic conventions to various colonies, like the Americas. “These artists are using painting, engaging with its traditions—and subverting its legacies—because of that history. Painting felt like a particularly loaded medium to unpack.”

Guadalupe Maravilla’s personal story of migration, from El Salvador to the U.S. during the 1980s, acts as a call to think about the ongoing mass deportations being conducted by ICE. In Pupusa Retablo (2023), the artist shows three women grilling masa for the titular dish and, in a painted caption, recalls how, while in Honduras on this sojourn, he ate pupusas: “A woman on the neighboring table told her friends that I was a Salvadoran refugee child because she noticed that I ate my pupusas with my hands. I remember feeling terrified of being sent back to El Salvador.” That experience, likely shared by countless others, was “an early lesson in assimilation,” Alvarez said.

While the works on view may all seem disparate, Alvarez said what connects the art and the artists together is “a deep sense of care for community, for heritage, for one another, lifting one another up.”

That sense of community informs the exhibition title, which borrows its name from Juan Felipe Herrera’s 2008 poem “Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way.” Alvarez came across it early in her research for the show and felt a strong connection to it because of its fluid use of Spanglish. “I’ve always read poetry because I don’t understand it. I’m the kind of person who’s like, I’m going to bang my head against the wall because I want to understand why I don’t understand it. But for the first time, reading a poem in Spanglish, it felt like, oh, somehow, I understand this.”

In the poem, Herrera describes people coming together with “pearls / of corn flowing árboles de vida en las cuatro esquinas” where we are “contentos llenos de fuerza to vida / giving nacimientos to fragrant ríos / dulces frescos verdes turquoise…” Alvarez printed out his words and hung them up, contemplating them for months. “I started to understand the poem as a celebration of abundance, as this invitation to gather together,” she said. “As I was trying to figure out the title of the exhibition, I realized that was exactly what I was doing: inviting these artists to be present in their fullest expression in the galleries.”

To mark the exhibition’s realization, the Buffalo AKG commissioned Herrera to write a poem, “So Many Years We Dreamed the Colors / Tantos años soñamos los colores” (2024), that directly responded to the checklist. Printed on the walls of the exhibition and reproduced in the accompanying catalog, it reads, in part, “so many years we dreamt / the colors the shapes the gathering / … / so we stand on this wall you can see us / you can study our language & thought / never studied you can taste our colors / never loved…”

The exhibition also features three commissioned artworks by Zapata, rafa esparza, and Justin Favela. Zapata has made three textile-covered columns, two of which hang from the ceiling, while the third leans against a wall. esparza contributed Tratos: Después de Pedro Valtierra Entre Redadas (2025–26), an adobe painting inspired by Valtierra’s 1998 photograph taken after the Acteal Massacre of the Indigenous group “Las Abejas” (The Bees), in Chiapas, Mexico. Supported by a steel armature, the work encourages visitors to walk on the adobe path behind it, where a coiled US flag is embedded. Into the work, esparza’s has also added a scene from the Florentine Codex showing a Spaniard whipping an Indigenous person and images of ICE raids in LA and Chicago, connecting centuries of oppression together.

Favela’s contribution is St. Maarten (1972), After Marisol, installed on a large wall that faces a window overlooking the museum’s front lawn. The piece’s subject is difficult to see from the gallery, but when viewed from outside, its reference to a watercolor by Marisol in Buffalo AKG’s collection becomes clear.

St. Maarten is part of Favela’s “piñata murals” series, which he began in protest after being asked by an art school professor to “make something about being Mexican.” His fellow white classmates hadn’t been asked about that, but he took it as a challenge. He responded by making a piñata, “a symbol that represented Latinidad that I thought would be so corny, so cheesy, that they’d say, ‘Oh, he’s making fun of our request,’” as he recalled. His teachers loved it, though he suspects his critique went over their heads—and so did he, finding it a fertile artmaking mode for the past 20 years. When the exhibition travels to the Des Moines Art Center next month, Favela will make a new piñata mural based on a work in that institution’s collection.

I imagine “Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way” will linger long after it comes down in Buffalo. Since 2022, the museum has been acquiring works for its permanent collection in anticipation of the show, beginning with Patrick Martinez’s Promised Land (2022), followed soon after by works by Guadalupe Maravilla, Ilana Savdie, and Eamon Ore-Giron. Since the exhibition opened in March, the museum has also added pieces by Felipe Baeza, Yvette Mayorga, and Salomón Huerta, as well as Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.’s towering Abogados Tierra Caliente (Billboard)—and it hopes to acquire even more in the coming months.

An exhibition like “Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way”, with its layered and nuanced approach to discussing both painting and Latinx identity, was urgently needed even at the time of its conception five years ago. Given today’s political climate, one that’s only grows more fraught, its message will likely be just as necessary five years from now.

To that end, Alvarez hopes that “Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way” is just the beginning for exhibitions of this kind. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “By design, the project gives people a peek into the discipline, and it’s an invitation to want to learn more. This exhibition is not a comprehensive survey—I am resisting the word ‘survey’ because that comes with the connotation that it’s a complete story.”