A Rare Spot for Latino Art Books and Prints in New York

At the inaugural La Feria Latinx press fair in New York City last weekend, I wasn’t always able to hear the artists speak, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Selena’s “Amor Prohibido” resonated across a floor of a New York University (NYU) building on Cooper Square in Manhattan, followed later by Shakira and Prince Royce’s duet “Deja Vu”.“ The artists featured in these two songs alone come from four countries: the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Colombia and the United States.

Organized by New York University’s Latinx Project, La Feria featured art, books, posters, stickers and more from at least 30 artists, whose offerings were as rich and varied as the fair’s playlist.

Prices ranged from $1 for prints by Queens-based collective Mobile Print Power to more than $100 for each of Gabriel García Román’s prints. Queer Icon printed.

“I’ve never been to one of these fairs,” said Panamanian-American artist Nicoletta Daríta de la Brown. “But I love it, because it’s like a bodega: Yes, come and take something with you.”

De la Brown, whose booth was called “Botánica Bodega,” sold large mesh bags that read, “I learned to love and heal in my grandmother’s kitchen.” The works are meant to be used as real grocery bags, inspired by the artist’s memories of shopping with her. grandmotherHer entire stand, she says, is in memory of her grandmother.

By exhibiting ceramic tiles from Columbus, Ohio, social worker Christian Casas isn’t making art for art’s sake. Casas began making art while enrolled in college and now teaches ceramics classes for children settling in the United States after crossing the southern border.

“I wanted to create an object to explore ceramics, but also explore their feelings,” Casas said, noting that art can be particularly meditative as “new Americans” struggle to translate from one language to another in their daily lives.

Also at the fair were Lopez and Inuer Pichardo, who met in second grade. The South Bronx duo said they reunited after a few years to document the place where they grew up through “changes,” like housing growth and gentrification.

“My mother always said that you could stop time by taking pictures. And I think the idea of ​​this project was to do just that, to just capture it,” Lopez explained.

Francisco Donoso’s table turned heads, with prints of manipulated documents from his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) process. Donoso said he was working on a 10-by-20-foot painting superimposed over those legal documents, but for the fair, he wanted to turn them into a book.

“We have to keep all this documentation,” he said. “I have boxes of my stuff… I started scanning them and then printing them on my own paintings to create these layers of meaning.”

At one of the last tables I visited, Oscar Diaz told me how he had photographed Cecilia Gentili, an Argentinian-American transgender activist who the artist called “half of Brooklyn’s mother.” A few months before Cecilia Gentili died in February, Diaz had photographed her at a “christening photoshoot.” More than 1,000 people attended a memorial service for her at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where she became the first transgender person to receive a funeral Mass at the historic church.

“She was the first person people went to when they were trying to access gender reassignment care. If they needed hormones or testosterone to get started on that journey, she helped them,” Diaz said.

In a smaller show, Jessica Elena Aquino sold prints made from carved school erasers, drawing on her experience as a teaching artist. She also makes cyanotypes of the landscape of her hometown of Santa Ana, California. Her friend sitting next to her was eager to tell me that Aquino would also be doing a residency at the University of Arkansas working with corn husks.

Aquino said the performers easily switched from Spanish to English when speaking to each other, creating a refreshing atmosphere. “You don’t see that all the time, especially in one room,” she added. “I feel more like myself.”