It’s Complicated: Race & Ethnicity in Latin American Art

Queer American Nigerian poet and music journalist, I.S. Jones is a Graduate Fellow with The Watering Hole and holds fellowships from Callaloo, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and Brooklyn Poets. I.S. hosts a month-long workshop every April called The Singing Bullet. She is an editor at 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, Washington Square Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hobart Pulp, The Rumpus, The Offing, Shade Literary Arts, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Spells Of My Name is forthcoming with Newfound in 2021.

Multidisciplinary artist Karina Aguilera Skvirsky’s practice began in photography and grew into video and performance. In 2019, she received a grant from Creative Capital to produce How to build a wall and other ruins, a project that includes a series of sculptural photographs, a multi-channel video installation and live performances. She has exhibited the project in solo exhibitions at Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico and Ponce + Robles Gallery in Madrid, Spain. Other important international exhibitions include her participation in Impermanence, the XIII Cuenca Biennial (Ecuador) curated by Dan Cameron in 2016 and There is always a cup of sea for man to sail, the 29th São Paulo Biennial in Brazil (2010).

Born 1977 in Honduras, Adán Vallecillo studied Fine Arts and Sociology in Honduras and Puerto Rico. He works and lives in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The methodology of his art practice is strongly based on research on-site and combining local visual and social aspects. In 2020 he received the Prize for Mid-Career Artist from CIFO Grands and Commissions, and recently attended residencies FLORA ars+natura in Bogotá, Colombia in 2018 and LARA (Latin American Roaming Art), Panama City, Panama in 2017.

New York-based curator, art writer and educator Dan Cameron launched his career in 1982 with Extended Sensibilities at the New Museum, the first institutional effort in the US to examine gay & lesbian identity in art. For over forty years, Cameron has held senior curatorial positions at the New Museum, Orange County Museum of Art and CAC New Orleans, and organized more than a hundred museum exhibitions, including surveys of Martin Wong, David Wojnarowicz, Faith Ringgold, and others. In 2007, Dan founded Prospect New Orleans, the contemporary art triennial to benefit the city after Hurricane Katrina, and organized the first two editions. More recently, his book on Nicole Eisenman’s paintings was published in 2021 by Lund Humphries.

Poet and editor Gaia Rajan is a cofounder of the WOC Speak Reading Series, a Junior Journal Editor for Half Mystic, a web manager for Honey Literary, and poetry editor for Saffron Literary. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Muzzle Magazine, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Moth Funerals, is out now from Glass Poetry Press, and she is a two-time National Student Poet semifinalist.