These Fellowships for Latinx Artists Are a Bright Spot Amid Pervasive Underfunding
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Verónica Gaona, To Know and to Dream at the Same Time, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
May’s announcement of the third cohort of Latinx Artist Fellowships was obviously great news for the 15 visual artists who were each awarded $50,000 in unrestricted funds. Beyond the impact on the artists, though, the awards — and the trajectory of the U.S. Latinx Art Forum (USLAF), which partners to administer them — touch on a broader set of issues including naming and identity, and the struggle to continue programs given uncertain long-term funder support.
The Latinx Artist Fellowship is part of a three-pronged program by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation called the Latinx Art Visibility Initiative. Its first segment is a five-year, $5 million commitment made in 2021 to support both individual artists and the Latinx Art Forum, the only national nonprofit in the country dedicated exclusively to Latinx visual art and art history. Another prong is designed to support museums committed to collecting and studying Latinx art — it’s up and running and announced its first round of 10 grants of $500,000 in March. The final planned initiative within the program, which has not yet been named or made any grants, will support professors and students committed to studying Latinx art and artists.
This year’s Latinx Artist Fellowship awardees include Felipe Baeza, a visual artist from Brooklyn; Ester Hernandez, who works as a printmaker, painter and mixed media artist in San Francisco; and photographer Diana Solís in Chicago. According to a press release, this year’s class of awardees was chosen “to reflect the Latinx community’s diversity, highlighting the practices of women-identified, queer, and nonbinary artists, as well as those from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, ranging from Chicanx and El Salvadoran to Dominican-American and Indigenous-identified. Deliberately intergenerational, [the fellowship] is equally divided between emerging, mid-career, and established artists.”
In addition to partnering with the New York Foundation for the Arts to administer the fellowships, the Latinx Art Forum’s other work includes an artist mentorship program, the Charla Fund, which sponsors artists’ conversations, and CHISPA, which originally provided pandemic relief funds to BIPOC artists. Other than two full-time employees hired thanks to Ford and Mellon’s support of the fellowship program, USLAF depends on volunteers, including its executive director, Dr. Adriana Zavala, a full-time tenured professor at Tufts University.
Zavala said that the original plan for the Latinx Art Forum was to make it a scholarly society within the umbrella of the College Art Association, similar to societies for Black art history, feminist art history, and American art history as a whole. But when Zavala and the other founders decided to open membership to recognize the community-based, grassroots nature of the field, more than half of the people who responded were living artists. So instead of establishing another society of art historians, Zavala said the Latinx Art Forum’s founders decided to create a nonprofit to support both art historians and current artists who are struggling right now.
What’s in a name?
The use of the term “Latinx” to describe Americans of Latin heritage has been met largely with indifference — and some objection — by the broader population of Americans of Latin origin. Among artists of Latin heritage who live and work in the United States, though, the “Latinx” umbrella may well help them stand out and be recognized, thus alleviating some of the struggles of the artists that USLAF exists to support. Zavala explained that, in her context, “Latinx” specifically refers to people of Latin heritage who may have familial ties to countries in Latin America. But, she said, “we are Americans in the United States” with worldviews shaped by lived experience in the political and cultural contexts of this country.
On a practical level, she went on, choosing “Latinx” as an identifier makes it easier to categorize these artists so that everyone from art lovers and academics to buyers and funders can find them. Using the case of a hypothetical artist named “Maria Sanchez” who was born and raised in Chicago but whose familial heritage is Mexican, Zavala explained that museums may choose to categorize Sanchez as either Mexican or American.
“If she’s classified as a Mexican artist and you’re looking for American artists with this heritage, you’re not going to find her,” Zavala said, while a search for American artists in the same database will return “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of people, making it impossible to find Sanchez or others like her if the searcher doesn’t already know their names. Multiply this by the many countries of origin from which the families of Latino or Latina artists may hail and it’s easy to understand why an umbrella term could simplify matters for everyone involved.
Underfunded and under the radar
Regardless of whether one uses “Latinx,” “Latino/Latina” or “Hispanic,” though, one thing is certain: Despite making up an estimated 19% of the U.S. population and comprising the largest racial demographic in the country aside from non-Hispanic whites, philanthropy as a whole is seriously neglecting them.
As my colleague Martha Ramirez reported last year, Latinos received roughly 1.3% of all philanthropic money from 2009-2019. Ford and Mellon’s $5 million commitment to the Latinx Art Forum and the artist fellowship is relatively modest by the standards of major foundations, but even though all of the 2021 numbers aren’t in yet, that figure is still a significant percentage of the $31 million that philanthropic funders committed to Latinx arts and culture organizations in 2021, according to the Latinx Funders research project. On the national level, that’s a startlingly low figure. And the fact that it has remained consistently low over the past decade underscores how few major new funders seem to be joining arts stalwarts like Ford and Mellon in this space (MacKenzie Scott being one exception).
The scant availability of funding for organizations like Zavala’s, along with the philanthrosphere’s continued reluctance to provide money for general operations, means that Zavala is working hard to raise enough money to keep both the fellowships and the Latinx Art Forum going after the Ford and Mellon money runs out. That funding has been a “game changer” for her organization, she said, but “there's no guarantee that beyond this five-year commitment, that we're going to be able to keep it going.”
"Organizations like ours, which are small, we're trying to both be in the trenches doing the work, and doing it in a way that's rigorous and vetted and ethical. We have reporting requirements to our funders and to the IRS. And that all takes a lot of work," Zavala said. And then there’s the work involved in soliciting and sifting through hundreds of nominations for the fellowships every year while running her nonprofit's other programs. If funders refuse to provide funding for operations, she said, how is that work going to happen?
Support from the Latinx Artist Forum and groups like it has been vital and transformational for many artists and art scholars. One of the 2023 cohort of fellows, for example, was doing their art in a windowless, unheated garage before receiving the award. Zavala said that another, an academic, broke down and cried after learning they had received an award, being at the point of giving up due to a lack of money. And overall, in a country that often struggles to understand the importance of the arts and humanities — and to adequately fund them — Zavala said “we need to build a healthy, robust, strong pipeline for community arts organizations and the people that they serve in museums, because this is what teaches the American public about what our nation's art heritage is.”
