GISELA COLÓN

UNIVERSITY SOUTH FLORIDA

CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN ART

TAMPA, FLORIDA

 

"X FACTOR: LATINX ARTISTS AND THE RECONQUEST OF THE EVERYDAY" ​

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Curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné

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January 17 - March 8, 2025

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The USF Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM), within the University of South Florida (Tampa) College of Design, Art & Performance, presents X Factor: Latinx Artists and the Reconquest of the Everyday. X Factor opens Friday, January 17 with an Artists Conversation and Opening Reception. The exhibition is on view from January 17 through March 8, 2025.

 

X Factor locates dynamic entry points into the ongoing discussion and expansion of the term Latinx through the work of 15 of America’s leading contemporary artists. The exhibition grounds a series of redefinitions of “Latinity” in the everyday lives of its creators, especially where artworks and creative processes reconquer novel meanings from hackneyed and conventional ideas of ethnicity, race, class, politics, representation, and the various histories of US migration.

 

Latinx is used as an inclusive, gender-neutral term for people of Latin American heritage and includes people of various races and languages with roots in more than 20 countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean. In recent years, the term has become especially important for individuals and communities that negotiate two, three, or more “intersecting identities”; additionally, it has helped generate ongoing conversations about representation, empowerment, queerness, genderfluidity, cultural consumption and access.

 

X Factor looks to historical, recent and commissioned works by key Latinx artists to engage, depict, and challenge the underlying complexities of these identities. An exhibition devoted to an artist-authored expansion of the cultural legacy of the Latin American diaspora, X Factor underscores a period of political and creative ferment in which fundamental redefinitions of both society and identity abound.

 

Exhibiting artists: Gabino A. Castelán, Gisela Colón, Danielle De Jesus, Lucia Hierro, Karlo Andrei Ibarra, Laura Perez Insua, José Lerma, Eddy A. López, Miguel Luciano, Narsiso Martinez, Angel Otero, Edison Peñafiel, Shizu Saldamando, Yiyo Tirado-Rivera and Rodrigo Valenzuela.

 

X Factor is curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné, CAM Curator at Large, and organized by USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa. X Factor is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. 

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