You Belong Here: Place, People, and Purpose in Latinx Photography

Overview

Press

Overview

You Belong Here: Place, People, and Purpose in Latinx Photography celebrates the dynamic photography of Latinx artists across the United States. The exhibition brings together established and emerging artists, who tackle themes of political resistance, family and community, fashion and culture, and the complexity of identity in American life.

Artists in the exhibition contribute to a vast visual archive of the Latinx experience as pluralistic, nuanced, and fluid. They illustrate a range of histories and geographies, contextualize and reinterpret watershed social and artistic movements, stake space for queerness, and articulate the importance of photography within the larger field of Latinx art.

You Belong Here explores contemporary photography that sheds light on social spaces—from intimate portrayals of home and family to collective experiences of the streets and nightlife—as well as the in-betweenness, or nepantla, of transnational, multiracial, and postcolonial identities. It generates an expansive dialogue about visibility and belonging for Latinx people.

Curated by Pilar Tompkins Rivas, chief curator and deputy director of Curatorial and Collections at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, You Belong Here originates from Tompkins Rivas’s work as guest editor of “Latinx,” the Winter 2021 issue of Aperture magazine.

Works by: Laura Aguilar, Genesis Báez, William Camargo, Sofía Córdova, Perla de Leon, Tarrah Krajnak, Hiram Maristany, Joiri Minaya, Steven Molina Contreras, Star Montana, Eddie Quiñones, Reynaldo Rivera, Guadalupe Rosales, Gabriela Ruiz and Bibs Moreno, and John M. Valadez

Image credit: Joiri Minaya, The Upkeepers, 2021; Guadalupe Rosales, Nicola’s, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; Steven Molina Contreras, Abigail’s Portrait, United States, 2019; Tarrah Krajnak, 1979: Contact Negatives, 2019. Courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne.

Installation shots: Courtesy Art on Hulfish, Princeton University Art Museum