10 Latinx contemporary artists that Christie’s is spotlighting this fall

The Spanish word ‘historia’ translates as both ‘story’ and ‘history’. Over recent decades, the art world has made a concerted effort to include both the stories and histories of Latin American artists in its galleries, museums, and auction houses, and we are finally seeing that spotlight focus on Latinx artists too — people of Latin American or Caribbean descent who have immigrated to the US, live, or work there.

Christie’s is presenting Historias/Histories in New York from 23 September to 22 October 2023, a selling exhibition of Latinx contemporary artists who explore themes of memory, storytelling, community and place in their work.

The exhibition includes both emerging and established artists working across painting and sculpture — but all of them hold a story that relates to the artist, and their shared community’s history. Meet ten of the featured artists, who are telling their stories and making history:

Yvette Mayorga

A first-generation Mexican American, Yvette Mayorga grew up in Chicago surrounded by the pink and plastic trappings of American millennial girlhood. She explores themes of migration and colonialism through the lens of a girl catapulted into a world of pop culture and Barbie-esque materialism. Her work — with its candy-coloured, rococo pink palette and references to baking and confectionary labour — challenges the association of the hyper femme with frivolity, instead positing it as a source of power and belonging.

Her Surveillance Locket series references miniature dollhouse Polly Pocket compacts. Mayorga says she ‘always dreamed’ of owning one as a young girl, seeing it as ‘a marker of attaining an Americanness that as a child of immigrants is often forced upon us in order to fit in’. Frosted like a cake, Pool Party incorporates the aspirational luxuries of 90s American girlhood: Hello Kitty décor and a heart-shaped mirror, swing set, waterslide and pool.

Her current solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is on view until March 17, 2024.

Dalton Gata

Born in Cuba and raised in Puerto Rico, Dalton Gata studied fashion design in the Dominican Republic before turning to painting. His experience with fashion editorial photography and his queer perspective inform his intimate portraits, which probe questions of identity, gender and beauty.

Gata’s paintings gleam with a patina of glamour that is juxtaposed with introspection and longing. In I wish my house had a pool, three figures are adorned with vibrant clothes and accessories, while their eyes convey a mood of unsettling discontent.

Gata is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. The ICA Miami held Gata’s first solo museum exhibition in 2021.

Aliza Nisenbaum

Aliza Nisenbaum was raised in Mexico City and now works in the US. Her work is rooted in the tradition of portraiture, guided by social justice and activism. She paints historically underrepresented communities — like undocumented immigrants — to honour their labour and identities. Her work evokes the legacies of Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Nisenbaum also forges empowering relationships with her sitters outside her studio. She gets involved in their communities, goes to their homes and gives them agency in the artistic process. Her subjects collaborate with her to choose which objects will surround them in their portraits.

This portrait of Gianina, Gianina “Gia”, who works as the Queens Museum Community Organizer and manages a weekly food distribution program and initiatives for Spanish-speaking communities, encapsulates Nisenbaum’s process. Nisenbaum completed a two-year residency at the Queens Museum, getting to know the staff members and painting them. Here she celebrates the work Gianina does for her community by surrounding her with hand tracings inscribed with messages of gratitude.

Armig Santos

Based in San Juan, Armig Santos makes paintings about Puerto Rico’s history and landscape, with many of his recent works referencing the island of Vieques and its bioluminescent waters. Six miles to the east of the Puerto Rican mainland, Vieques was for six decades the controversial site of a US Naval Training Range from 1941 to 2003.

Santos’s work resists picture-postcard simplicity — his landscapes are layered with political tension. In the case of Developer, it’s unclear if the person on the horizon is the developer in question, looking out with an acquisitive gaze or a local contemplating the effect of development on the island post-Hurricane Maria. Santos leaves the ambiguity open to the viewer’s interpretation.

He has exhibited at the Whitney and held his first solo exhibition at New York’s Calderón gallery in 2022.

Gamaliel Rodríguez

Gamaliel Rodríguez uses pencil, ink, acrylic and ballpoint pen to depict aerial views of landscapes in Puerto Rico and US territories. Hyperrealist and dystopian, his works convey historical events in contemporary terms to interrogate the failures of modernisation and the military occupation of the island.

La alegoría del San Antón is based on a fire that took place on the San Antón, a Spanish ship, off the coast of present-day Cabo Rojo in December 1538, sinking the vessel and killing 40 enslaved people on board. Rodríguez’s symbolic and contemporary depiction transforms the tragic event into an indictment of imperialism and capitalism. He turns the traditional ship into a modern freight ship and the masts into palm trees to draw parallels between the colonial past and the present day.

Rodríguez has exhibited worldwide and is represented in major public collections including the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in San Juan and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Miguel Luciano

Based in Brooklyn, Miguel Luciano’s activist multimedia practice probes the politics of race, class, history and popular culture in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. He frequently uses familiar images from childhood to help viewers come to terms with lost histories.

Barceloneta Bunnies is part of the series Louisiana Porto Ricans, which reimagines vintage labels from the 1930s and 1940s that advertised Puerto Rican produce. This painting references a town in Puerto Rico that was once the site of US-sponsored sterilisation programs, an official policy on the island from the 1930s to the 1970s, and that today is the site of the world’s leading producer of Viagra. The rabbits are motifs of hyper-sexualisation, but more specifically, the Trix rabbit and Nesquik bunny are maimed, drugged and caricatured to figure the hypocrisies of US policy on the island.

Luciano was recently an artist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico.

Juan Sánchez

Born to Puerto Rican immigrants in Brooklyn, Juan Sánchez is one of the most influential Nuyorican and American artists of the 20th century. Informed by the Young Lords as well as by his teachers Hans Haacke, Leon Golub and the artist collective Taller Boricua, he emerged in the 1980s with a politically activist multimedia practice and has mentored numerous younger artists like Miguel Luciano.

Sánchez’s work bridges the fragmented identities and experiences of Puerto Ricans, both those who live on the island and those who form the diaspora. He uses the term rican/struction, adapted from the salsa musician Ray Barretto, to describe his ongoing series of mixed-media and collaged works that portray these fragmented identities. In Para Tito Puente, images of St. Martin de Porres, patron saint of social justice, are placed on a grid and crowned by the image of Tito Puente, the pioneering salsa and jazz musician. The rican/struction is overlaid by a Santería symbol — a circle divided by four double-headed arrows — to represent the diaspora going in different directions.

Sánchez has exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and is represented in major public collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, El Museo del Barrio and the National Portrait Gallery.

Freddy Rodríguez

Freddy Rodríguez (1945-2022) grew up in the Dominican Republic. In the 1960s he moved to New York City to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the New School. At the time, the New York art world was in the throes of abstraction, and his practice largely evolved around its different facets, specifically hard-edged and geometric abstraction. He addressed issues of colonisation, immigration and other aspects of his Dominican heritage throughout his oeuvre.

Pirámide figures the pyramidal hierarchy of different forms of abstraction, pitting Abstract Expressionism against hard-edged painting and incorporating the legacy of modern colourists like Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko and Frank Stella. This work was included in his last solo exhibition at Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary.

Rodríguez began to get the recognition he deserved towards the end of his life, when the Whitney acquired his work Y me quedé sin nombre.

He is now represented in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. and El Museo del Barrio.

César Martínez

Born in Laredo, Texas, in 1944, César Martínez settled in San Antonio in 1971 and immersed himself in the Chicano Movement alongside artists like José Treviño, José Esquivel and Mel Casas. He joined the pioneering artist collective Con Safos and later co-founded the group Los Quemados with Carmen Lomas Garza and Amado Peña.

Portraiture is an important part of his work, but rather than portraying specific individuals, Martínez universalises his characters to convey instantly recognisable physiological types. Shorty belongs to his Pachuco series, which illustrates the young Chicano hipsters who defined the street style of Martínez’s adolescence. The figure’s frontal orientation and deadpan expression references portrait photography — he cites Richard Avedon as an influence — whilst the background evokes the abstract painting of colourists like Mark Rothko. This tension between figuration and abstraction is at play throughout Martínez’s work.

He held a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago in 2017 and is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the San Antonio Museum of Art.

Gisela Colón

Gisela Colón grew up in Puerto Rico and in the early 1990s moved to Los Angeles, where she encountered the legacy of California’s Light and Space movement through artists like Mary Corse, Peter Alexander and Larry Bell.

Colón is influenced by science, spirituality and mythology. While connected to the traditions of early minimalism laid out by Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, she describes her work as ‘organic minimalism’, bringing it into a more contemporary context. Duality is inherent to her oeuvre: her sleek Parabolic Monolith sculptures echo the eternal forms of prehistoric artefacts whilst their iridescent carbon fibre forms appear strikingly contemporary.

Parabolic Monolith (Perseus) pays tribute to a constellation in the northern sky, host of the annual Perseid meteor shower. Luminous and opalescent, it exudes an ethereal glow, blooming with crystalline swirls of orange and blue.

Colón has exhibited widely around the world and presented a work from her Parabolic Monolith series at Desert X AlUla in Saudi Arabia in 2020. Her work has been acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pérez Art Museum Miami and El Museo del Barrio.