Since opening its new building, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum continues to have some of the best programming in America. That is why their new exhibition, Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way, comes as no surprise in the sense that they seem to be capturing a pulse. There are fifty-eight artists in the exhibition, which for the work of curator Andrea Alvarez, is bold, but it is the way it is curating across a spectrum of Latinx artists.
Perhaps in Los Angeles, we get jaded to the fact that something has been bubbling in the scene for quite a few years now, though not every artist in the show is from LA, there are many artists we can call hometown heroes. The question I have always had is how the country could better understand this era. Many of the artists in the show I know personally or have spent time with, even covered in my previous job, such as Salomón Huerta, Ozzie Juarez, Patrick Martinez, rafa esparza, Manuel Lopez, Danie Cansino, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr, Bony Ramirez, Monica Kim Garza, just to name a few. I think the volume matters. It isn’t a moment that can be condensed down to a few names, and the advantage of having this contemporary moment on display is that it gives the breadth literally more room to breathe.
I’m going to borrow from the press release, because the sections of the show are important:
The show’s intergenerational and regionally broad dialogue is reflected in seven thematic groupings: (New) Histories, offering new perspectives on personal, cultural, and global histories; Bodies & Figures, representations of and by marginalized people, considering the importance of the body, and who is or isn’t seen in an image; Identity/Place, a consideration of how identity and place shape each other with a diasporic lens; Land/tierra, varied approaches to land and the built environment, from the material to the imaginary; Community, highlighting various communities—artistic, blood, and chosen—and their importance to populations within the diaspora; Pinturx, contemporary Latinx approaches to traditional painting genres like still life and portraiture; and Abstractions, exploring centuries-long Indigenous and European abstract traditions still in use by artists today.
Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way feels like a tipping point, a change in understanding the impact that Latinx artists have on the vernacular and visual identity of contemporary art. The title of the show stems from former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem “[Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way],” which again demonstrates that the community at the heart of this show extends to all genres and mediums. This is one not to miss. —Evan Pricco
