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 of 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 explores 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 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.
Images
Reynaldo Rivera, Elyse Regehr and Javier Orosco, Downtown LA, 1989, digital print from negative. © Reynaldo Rivera. Courtesy of the artist; Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York / Los Angeles; and Aperture.
William Camargo, We Gonna Have to Move Out Soon Fam!, Anaheim, 2019, archival pigment print. © William Camargo. Courtesy of the artist and Aperture.
Guadalupe Rosales, Nicola's, 2022, archival pigment print. © Guadalupe Rosales. Courtesy of the artist; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; and Aperture.
