WASHINGTON, DC.- The National Gallery of Art has acquired over 40 significant works by contemporary Latinx and Latin American artists of different generations, including Luis Cruz Azaceta, Ken Gonzales-Day, Guadalupe Maravilla, Michael Menchaca, Aberlardo Morell, Sophie Rivera, Joseph Rodríguez, and Rafael Soriano. Spanning photography, painting, sculpture, and mixed media, these works demonstrate the National Gallery’s commitment to artistic excellence and support our goal to build a collection that reflects and attracts the nation and its global connections. These new acquisitions include significant works by artists who participate in major art movements and whose practices explore creative experimentation, personal and communal identity, and histories of the United States and the Americas.
“Our collection has grown in exciting ways over the past few years as we strived to capture a fuller view of the history of art, both nationally and globally,” said E. Carmen Ramos, the National Gallery’s Chief Curatorial and Conservation Officer. “Collectively, these artists bring forth noteworthy practices and perspectives that are new to our collection. Their works fill in major gaps and empower us to tell complex and compelling stories in our galleries that can connect with our audiences. The ongoing, insightful work to broaden our collection will continue with the recent arrival of our new associate curator of Latinx art, Natalia Ángeles Vieyra, whose work will expand, study, and interpret our evolving collection of modern and contemporary Latinx art.”
Rivera’s photographs are included in the exhibition The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography, open October 6, 2024, through April 6, 2025. Works by Azaceta, Maravilla, and Soriano will be on view in an exhibition in 2026.
Luis Cruz Azaceta (b. 1942)
Throughout his career, Azaceta has returned to the subject of the balsero (rafter), a term frequently used in the Caribbean for someone who risks their life on a small boat, raft, or inner tube in search of a better future. One of his most exhibited and important works, ARK (1994) was created amid the balsero crisis in the 1990s when around 40,000 Cubans were intercepted at sea trying to reach the United States. Painted primarily in shades of black, white, gray, and brown, the canvas is speckled with white dots, suggesting the reflection of water against the sun or moonlight. A gaunt figure with an arm that has transformed into a large oar (a self-portrait) has been separated from an inner tube above his head. Five Polaroid photographs depicting scenes of rafters, a shark, hubcaps, and a picture of the artist himself curled on his side appear to hang from thin ropes painted on the canvas, extending from the top. Azaceta links this work to the experience of exile and diaspora: “I live in Diaspora. My home (my culture) I carry with me. I am in perpetual movement. An infinite voyage. Neither here nor there. Floating on a raft, carrying my freedom, dreams and desires.”
As a longtime resident of New Orleans, Azaceta and his family experienced the horrific events and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Katrina Boat (2007) recalls televised imagery of the event, when many New Orleans residents climbed on their roofs or into boats, if they had them, to survive the floodwaters. Azaceta covered the boat in discarded detritus—broken fence posts, rat traps, electrical parts, plywood remnants, and a makeshift sail made from an oar and electrical wire—and painted the inside orange (a color the artist associates with hell) to suggest the desperation of the victims of Katrina. A universal symbol of migration, the boat also recalls the tragedy of the Middle Passage and hints at the exodus that ensued in the months following the Katrina disaster, when New Orleans residents settled in other parts of the United States.
After immigrating to the United States from Cuba in 1960, Azaceta settled in New York and New Jersey and began his artistic education at the School of Visual Arts during the rise of pop art and hard-edge minimalism. Following a trip to Spain in the 1970s, where he encountered the work of Francisco de Goya, Azaceta devoted himself to exploring the human condition in times of crisis—inspired by his own experience of violence, unrest, abrupt migration, and exile. His work often features his own likeness to convey his identification with and empathy for everyday people living through difficult historical and political experiences.
Ken Gonzales-Day (b. 1964)
Gonzales-Day is celebrated for the work he has done to focus attention on the underexamined history of lynching in the American West. His Pulitzer-nominated book Lynching in the West, 1850–1935 (2006) established that the racially motivated crime of lynching was far more widespread than previously known and stretched beyond the American South. For example, he discovered that there were 350 cases of lynchings in the state of California between 1850 and 1935—mainly of Latinx, Native American, and Asian American people.
His provocative and compelling series of photographs, Erased Lynchings, draws on the research done for the book. Gonzales-Day digitally scanned historic postcards and other archival photographs of lynchings, from which he then removed all evidence of the victims and the rope used in the crime. Erased Lynchings V (2023) includes 15 inkjet prints of the fronts and backs of postcards as well as stereo and archival photographs of lynchings, all approximately the same size as the original photographs. The title of each individual work notes the name of the victim and where the crime took place. Inscriptions on both the fronts and backs of the postcards emphasize the callous brutality of both the crime and the community that condoned it.
Nightfall (2006), from his series Searching for California Hang Trees, was part of his effort “to witness for myself, the land on which these acts had occurred,” he said. Although he discovered that most of the historic hang trees where lynchings took place in California were destroyed after the murders or had died from disease, he was able to determine the sites where the crimes occurred. The photographs in this series are not documents, but, in Gonzales-Day’s words, “embodied acts . . . a new kind of landscape photography [that imagines] a new kind of audience.” These pictures evoke a sense of the impact of the crimes on the families and their communities.
Guadalupe Maravilla (b. 1976)
Maravilla’s celebrated performative and sculptural works explore themes of migration, trauma, health, and healing. The two acquired retablos, January 1984 Retablo and Bless You Magic Flying Woman Retablo depict episodes in the story of Maravilla’s migration to the United States as an unaccompanied eight-year-old minor. They rely on the traditional formats of retablos or ex-votos that include painted scenes and narrative text conveying stories of divine intervention or expressing gratitude for answered prayers. Maravilla surrounds these images with spiky, waxlike forms that resemble animals or skeletons, to which he attached symbolic items such as toys, pencils, and objects from daily life and folk art, including sculptures that he collected from the geographic route of his own migration. Mexican retablo painters Alfredo and Daniel Vilchis collaborated with Maravilla to create the painted scenes. Diagnosed with colon cancer at the age of 36, Maravilla experienced healing through both Western and non-Western approaches; his diagnosis led him to associate his experience of trauma as a young child with his illness as an adult. In English and Spanish narratives written below each painting, he recounts his childhood state of mind and his adult reflections on the past, exploring the relationship between trauma and illness.
January 1984 Retablo (2022) features references to Maravilla’s childhood: a boy dressed up as a Transformer action figure, a soccer field with goalposts. A female figure in a pink robe and a mask taps a triangle bell over the boy, indicating a link between sound and healing. Below are two animals—a white dog, which the artist sees as a protective figure, and a gray coyote, which refers to an Indigenous trickster figure as well as a person who moves immigrants across the border for payment. The narrative recounts the details of Maravilla’s sudden departure from home and the reasons for his migration: the everyday dangers caused by civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s. During this phase of the Cold War, US foreign policy supported the Salvadoran government against an insurgent rebel force known as Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).
Bless You Magic Flying Woman Retablo (2022) portrays the artist’s unaccompanied flight to New York to be reunited with his parents, the last stage of his migration. The painting depicts the interior of an airplane with a young Maravilla looking out the window. The boy is surrounded by animals and natural forms, likely a reference to El Salvador; his internal digestive organs are visible, suggesting the artist's beliefs about connection between emotionally intense experiences and his future illness. A flight attendant in the upper right corner, encircled by sun rays, evokes the Virgin or another saintly figure—perhaps an expression of gratitude to one who cared for Maravilla during his anxious childhood flight into the unknown.
Michael Menchaca (b. 1985)
Menchaca’s suite of 16 screenprints, La Raza Cósmica 20XX (2019), includes artist-designed frames covered in various social media and “Big Tech” icons. They conceived the project as a mythical reinterpretation of Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos’s mestizo identity theory, La Raza Cósmica (1925). According to Vasconcelos, the Latin American intermixing of European DNA with Indigenous American, Asian, and African DNA created a technical fusion, or “mestizáje,” which he designated the “cosmic” or universal race. Menchaca’s La Raza Cósmica combines Vasconcelos’s theory and 18th-century Spanish casta paintings, popular in Spanish colonial Mexico, as a visual hierarchical guide of stereotyped racial and socioeconomic identities.
This series features New World racial combinations in the guise of a variety of animal archetypes and mythological figures who pose with contemporary “smart” devices and other technology-based imagery. In works composed in the 18th-century casta painting format, interracial couples are paired with their resulting offspring and a corresponding historical racial designation that was used in colonial Mexico and the broader Americas, such as “Quarteron” or “Mulato,” on a label below. The prints are executed in a completely different, highly stylized, brightly colored mode reminiscent of both Mayan glyphs and Japanese animation. Menchaca thus draws from world mythology and contemporary forms of communication to depict a variety of Latinx “families” as hybrid constructs of digital technology. His works draw comparisons between what Menchaca sees as Silicon Valley’s continued legacy of systemic bias and antiquated forms of categorization and oppression.
Menchaca is a Xicanx, Mexican American, Mexica, Mestizx, queer multidisciplinary visual artist based in San Antonio, Texas, who works at the intersection of printmaking and new media formats. Their digital-based imagery combines the frameworks of ancient Mesoamerican codices, European bestiaries, Catholic baroque paintings, and Japanese video games with the seductive interfaces of social media and big data technology. Using inventive imagery and coded symbolism, Menchaca explores the social variances that define Latinx peoples across lines of gender, race, age, class, caste, nationality, neurodiversity, sexuality, and ability.
Abelardo Morell (b. 1948)
For more than 30 years, Morell has combined the most advanced technology with the oldest-known camera—a camera obscura—to infuse photography and everyday reality with wonder and surprise. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s he made highly inventive black-and-white camera obscura photographs, first in the living room of his home outside Boston and later in rooms around the world: New York, Rome, London, and Havana, among other places. The National Gallery has acquired five of these works that merge right side up and upside down, inside and outside, absence and presence, public and private experience, to evoke a dreamscape where everyday reality is transformed into a magical playground for the mind.
In his work Flowers for Lisa #2 (2015), Morell set a vase against a plain background, inserted a few stems, photographed them, then removed them. Part of a larger series, he did this repeatedly until he had dozens of pictures of different flowers all in the same vase—then combined them into one overflowing, exuberant display symbolizing, as he says, his feelings for his wife on her birthday.
In the mid-2000s, Morell began to work in color, occasionally using a prism to project the image of the outside world right side up in his interior space, as well as using a digital camera that allowed him to have shorter exposures and to capture motion. In the 2010s, he and his assistant designed a lightproof tent that uses a periscope and lens to project views of the surrounding landscape onto the ground beneath the tent, allowing him to photograph places previously inaccessible—especially sites depicted by earlier landscape painters and photographers, such as American artists Albert Bierstadt and Timothy O'Sullivan and European artists such as John Constable, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh. Four of these tent camera pictures have entered the collection, representing Morell’s most recent works.
Sophie Rivera (1938–2021)
In 1978, Rivera made a photographic portrait series of fellow New Yorkers of Puerto Rican descent, known as Nuyoricans, that countered the often-stereotypical representations of the community found in popular culture of the time.
Rivera discovered her subjects by asking passersby in her Harlem neighborhood if they were Puerto Rican; if so, she invited them into her home to be photographed. Bathed in light, each sitter addresses the viewer directly. Rivera darkened the area around her subjects during the printing process to intensify their presence. While current hairstyles and fashions reflect the contemporary moment, Rivera sought to claim Nuyoricans’ place in the longer history of American portrait photography, as reflected in the 2 works from this series. As she noted, “I have attempted to integrate my cultural heritage into an artistic continuum.”
In a later series, Rivera used the technique of double exposure to capture the energy and movement of children at a playground. One example, as seen in Timing is Everything (1993), depicts two sitting children playing in the sand overlapped with a group on a jungle gym.
Part of a generation of Puerto Rican photographers who documented themselves and their community on their own terms, Rivera defined herself as “an artist, Latino, and feminist.” She was an early member and instructor of En Foco, an organization founded in 1974 that supports photographers of African, Asian, Latinx, Native American, and Pacific Islander heritage, and was committed to opening the field of photography to more diverse voices. Rivera studied at the New School for Social Research and attended workshops taught by photographers Paul Caponigro and Lisette Model.
Joseph Rodríguez (b. 1951)
The National Gallery acquired 10 works from Spanish Harlem (1985–1988), Rodríguez’s photographic series that depicts the cacophony of a busy neighborhood in saturated color. Not shying away from the hardships experienced by many in the community, Rodríguez’s lens seeks to capture, as he puts it, “the struggles of everyday life.” Yet many of the photographs in the series also portray communal life in Catholic rituals, social clubs, and moments of joy on the street.
Throughout his decades-long career, Rodríguez has sought to document the “domestic landscape of America” in his photographs. He grew up in Brooklyn, then studied photography at the School of Visual Arts. After earning a photojournalism and documentary diploma from the International Center of Photography in 1985, he began a career as a photojournalist, working for the Black Star photo agency and numerous news organizations and publications including New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, and New York Magazine.
Rodríguez has published several photobooks and pursued independent and wide-ranging projects in Puerto Rico and the United States, as well as in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Mauritius, among others. Seeking out marginalized people and communities, and often focusing on the criminal justice system, Rodríguez works in the social documentary tradition to tell stories of people in a way that foregrounds shared realities rather than differences.
Rafael Soriano (1920–2015)
Soriano’s early work was often more painterly than that of his contemporaries, with titles that relate to the natural world. The bright shifting colors in Luciérnaga (Firefly) (1955) suggest energy and flight, as well as the colors of the Cuban landscape at different times of day. La búsqueda (The Search) (1968) reveals how Soriano’s palette darkened and moved toward rounded yet still clearly defined shapes, existing in undefined, open spaces. La búsqueda depicts a three-legged form with two eyes turned toward the sky, suggesting an inward and spiritual orientation. Between the 1970s and 2000s, Soriano developed a rich vocabulary of quasi-figural and biomorphic forms and began to incorporate underpainting, scumbling, and glazes into his technique. El descanso del héroe (The Hero at Rest) (1992) is a prime example of this late style, with mysterious shapes that resemble diaphanous curtains or sinewy muscles and visually build on the surrealist psychological inscapes of Chilean artist Roberto Matta (1911–2002).
Soriano was a leading geometric abstractionist in Cuba before the Cuban Revolution sent him into exile, changing his life and work forever. His career spanned several pivotal moments in global, Cuban, and American art and history, from the rise of abstract modern art in Cuba in the 1950s to the rupture of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the impact of migration on Cuban artists. Three Soriano paintings, recently acquired by the National Gallery, capture pivotal moments in his important career: his geometric/concrete phase from the 1950s, when Soriano and his Cuban contemporaries were in dialogue with abstract tendencies in Europe and Latin America; his transitional phase, when he abandoned hard-edged geometry following his emotionally unsettling experience of migration in the 1960s; and his final, mature work featuring otherworldly and biomorphic tendencies that suggest metaphysical states of mind and spirit.
