You Belong Here: Place, People, and Purpose in Latinx Photography celebrates the dynamic photography of Latinx artists across the United States. The exhibition brings together established and emerging artists who tackle themes of political resistance, family and community, fashion and culture, and the complexity of identity in American life.
Artists in the exhibition contribute to a vast visual archive that chronicles the Latinx experience as pluralistic, nuanced, and fluid. They illustrate a range of histories and geographies, contextualize and reinterpret watershed social and artistic movements, stake space for queerness, and articulate the importance of photography within the larger field of Latinx art.
You Belong Here presents contemporary photography that sheds light on social spaces—from intimate portrayals of home and family to collective experiences of the streets and nightlife—as well as on the in-betweenness, or nepantla, of transnational, multiracial, and postcolonial identities. It generates an expansive dialogue about visibility and belonging for Latinx people.
Curated by Pilar Tompkins Rivas, chief curator and deputy director of Curatorial and Collections at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, You Belong Here originates from Tompkins Rivas’s work as guest editor of Latinx, the Winter 2021 issue of Aperture magazine. This exhibition is organized by Aperture.
About Aperture:
Aperture is a nonprofit publisher that leads conversations around photography worldwide. From our base in New York, Aperture connects global audiences and supports artists through our acclaimed quarterly magazine, books, exhibitions, digital platforms, public programs, limited-edition prints, and awards. Established in 1952 to advance “creative thinking, significantly expressed in words and photographs,” Aperture champions photography’s vital role in nurturing curiosity and encouraging a more just, tolerant society.
Above: Genesis Báez, Parting (Braid), 2021, 30 x 42 in., archival pigment print
Genesis Báez (Born 1990, Attleboro, MA; active New York, NY) was born to Puerto Rican parents who migrated to New England to work in factories. After her mother and grandmother took her to Puerto Rico for the first time, she developed a relationship with the island. “In a sense,” she says, “I inherited Puerto Rico and a connection to a homeland through the women in my family.” That all Báez’s subjects are women is intentional. By focusing on the hand gestures of her subjects, Báez explores the complexity of care, touch, and belonging among the diasporic communities of Puerto Rican women in her home in the northeastern United States and beyond. “I like to think about how gesture and touch can conjure a sense of belonging when one’s attachment to a place has been disrupted by migration, colonial legacies, and climate change,” she says. Báez gives little indication of geographic context; however, clues occasionally appear in the frame—like a winter coat or the roots of a ceiba tree. She offers instead a universal interpretation of migration, cyclical movements, and transient connections.
Programming & Financial Support
At the Chazen Museum of Art, this exhibition is supported by the Brittingham Trust.