Modern Latin American Art history and the Neo-Latino Collective

by Dr. Marguerite Mayhall, Modern Latin American Art Historian, Art History Program

Fifteen years ago this spring, students in the Art History capstone course designed and installed an exhibition called Ser Latino: Being Latino in New Jersey. The students in the class included: Vanessa (Chippendale) Lopez, Joseph Field, Megan Hamill, Lia Hempel, Charles Laskowski, April Perez, and Amy Wenzel. The exhibition gave students hands-on experience in art history, and several of these students have gone on to careers in the arts and academia – Joseph Field teaches art history at Brooklyn College, is an instructor at the 92nd Street Y and worked as Supervisor and Coordinator of Gallery Guides at the Guggenheim, and Vanessa Lopez has worn many hats, including that of Art Teacher, at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit, New Jersey. Lia Hempel is now Assistant Director of Gift Planning at Wellesley College in Boston.

Everything about the show was student run and organized, from contacting the artists, meeting them in their studios and interviewing them, to choosing the works to be exhibited. In some cases, students (and my husband!) helped transport the works to the Howe Gallery in the Vaughn Eames building.

We designed the exhibition installation and did the installation ourselves. Students also produced a catalog and wrote essays on the artists and their work, which you see above. The opening for the show was well attended. It was featured on the news on WMBC and written up in the Star Ledger (23 October 2005), and in both The Tower and the Cougar’s Byte: https://issuu.com/cougarsbyte/docs/kean1107.

Ser Latino en Nueva Jersey/Being Latino/a in New Jersey,Howe Gallery, October 2005.

On the 15th anniversary of that show, students in the Modern Latin American Art and Architecture class this semester interviewed artists from the Neo-Latino Collective as their final project. The blog posts that follow are based, in part, on interviews with the following artists: José Rodeiro, Josephine Barreiro, Gabriel Navar, Nelson Alvarez, Rita Jiménez, and the late Raúl Villareal (the only artist to have works exhibited in Ser Latino). Some artists elected to answer interview questions by email, some via video call.

https://neolatinocollective.com/

The students in the class this semester are:

Musa Ali

Ashley Bacchus

Alenis Baez

Stephanie Calixto

Sarah Copeland

Isis Day

Chelsea Doyle

Alec Duerr

Angela Figueroa

Jasmin Finney-Tillman

Samantha Jezowicz

Rob Looby

Melanie Luengas

George Moreno

Joseph Noda

Mary Padiernos

Joanna Szpernoga

Edward Tengwall