Latinos are the largest minority group in the U.S., and according to recent data, around 13-14 percent of Americans speak Spanish at home, with 43-44 million native Spanish speakers and roughly 12 million bilingual speakers, many of them second- or third-generation members of the diaspora. At the same time, some of the most compelling artistic voices to have emerged in the United States in recent years are of South or Central American and Caribbean descent. Yet no proper institutional survey at a U.S. museum had attempted to map these developments or acknowledge their role in shaping contemporary art—until “Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way” opened at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
On view through September 6, the exhibition brings together 58 artists in an intergenerational dialogue to explore contemporary Latinx artists’ innovations and interventions within established traditions of painting, while maintaining and elevating the singularity of each practice. “I think we’ve seen many important exhibitions that are thematic or geographically focused, but we needed a show like this—one that establishes a broader framework,” curator Andrea Alvarez, who conceived the show, told Observer. “I think our museum has played a role in shaping American art history, and I felt this was an opportunity.” Taking advantage of an unusually long research period, Alvarez conducted extensive studio visits across the U.S. and Puerto Rico, building a case for positioning these artists alongside leading contemporary figures.
Notably, all the artists included are living and active today. While some were born in the 1950s, many belong to later generations, reinforcing the exhibition’s focus on contemporary practice and offering a snapshot of what the Latinx community is creating right now. At the same time, Alvarez chose to focus solely on painting—a medium closely tied to the museum’s identity—to establish a clear curatorial lens while maintaining a manageable scope within an otherwise vast field. “Early on, someone asked me whether I was trying to create a show to define a ‘Latinx style,’ but that is not the case,” she says, clarifying how the exhibition proposes diversity itself as the defining condition, reflecting the complexity of the population it represents.
The U.S. Latino population now accounts for nearly one in five Americans and is overwhelmingly bilingual or Spanish-capable. Still, many Latino people no longer speak Spanish, a result of generational pressures to assimilate after migration. The term “Latinx,” despite its visibility in media and academia, is used by only a small minority, exposing a widening gap between institutional language and cultural self-identification.
“For me, adopting the term ‘Latinx’ means drawing on a language that emerged from LGBTQ communities, particularly online, as a way to resist gender binaries. It becomes a useful framework—a category that opens a conversation about a vast population in the United States and the Caribbean that is making important cultural contributions,” Alvarez explains. Reflecting on the term’s limitations and controversies, she notes that without a category, it becomes difficult to establish a presence in discourse or in the market. “When you name something, it begins to exist. That idea goes back generations, centuries.”
The inclusion of Caribbean artists introduces further complexity to the framing of Latinx identity. While acknowledging clear cultural and historical distinctions between Caribbean and other Latin American or Chicanx contexts, Alvarez highlights recurring thematic concerns that cut across these differences. “Through studio visits and research, these shared themes kept appearing, regardless of whether the artists identified as Chicano, Caribbean or otherwise.”
The exhibition is structured to foreground these shared dialogues rather than impose a unified identity. For Alvarez, the curatorial aim is for audiences to encounter that multiplicity through the works on view and, in doing so, arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the communities behind them. “I’m not suggesting there is a single aesthetic that can be pinned down. Rather, the art is as diverse, rich and complex as the population itself. My goal is for visitors to move through the exhibition, understand that through the work and, in turn, gain a deeper understanding of who we are as people.”
The idea for the project emerged partially from Alvarez’s own experience in Buffalo, as a Latina herself observing the richness of the city’s immigrant and refugee communities, including a significant Latino population that remains underrecognized. “The Latino community here is not as visible as in cities like Los Angeles or New York. This exhibition is part of an effort to better serve that community,” Alvarez explains. While she has previously worked on smaller exhibitions addressing these audiences, this marks the most ambitious iteration of that effort. Though the show focuses on Latinx artists, Alvarez hopes that its themes—movement, displacement and migration—will resonate with broader audiences who share similar experiences.
Although not conceived as a direct response to current events, the exhibition arrives at a particularly charged political moment. However, Lavarez emphasizes, the project is the result of long-term artistic and scholarly work. “Of course, it gets read differently now, and in some ways it’s important that it is being seen in this context,” she acknowledges, while also considering how someone might experience the show outside of this moment of turmoil. “Because ultimately, what we are doing is celebrating these artists’ contributions and situating them within broader fields.”
Each artist responds differently to contemporary realities—some directly, others more obliquely—and the exhibition follows the lead of these individual narratives. Spanning an entire museum floor, it allows the plurality of its narratives to unfold through seven thematic groupings. Alvarez identifies elements such as materiality, rasquachismo and references to art history as recurring across the works, but frames them as strategies rather than themes. “The themes I focus on in the exhibition are distinct from the strategies artists use. Those are tools. The themes are more about the underlying concerns.”
In the first section, (New) Histories, artists bring a subjective perspective to different forms of historical and global narratives, foregrounding history as something actively rewritten rather than passively inherited. Bodies & Figures focuses on representations of and by marginalized people, considering the importance of the body and who is or isn’t seen in an image. “Artists take different historical narratives and reclaim them,” Alvarez reflects, citing as an example a work by Guadalupe Maravilla that reflects an early moment of assimilation—the need to camouflage oneself.
The next room, Identity/Place, features artists exploring how identity and place shape each other through a diasporic lens. “This section considers what happens when figures are visible or invisible in an image,” Alvarez explains, pointing to a work by Felipe Baeza, where visibility shifts as one moves, or Lillian Martinez’s appropriation of a painting by Matisse that inserts a brown woman to question what happens when minoritized figures have space for leisure, identity and presence.
Two sections focus on the unique dialogue Latinx artists have established and are establishing with art history. Pinturx highlights the diverse range of contemporary Latinx approaches to traditional painting genres such as still life and portraiture, while Abstractions foregrounds the native roots of abstraction well before modernism, tracing centuries-long relations between Indigenous and European abstract traditions that are still alive in the work of artists today. Alvarez coined the term ‘pinturx’ herself, combining pintura with the x from Latinx. “This section focuses on academic painting genres—still life, interior scenes and geometric abstraction—and reconsiders them through a Latinx lens. It’s about how inherited genres become hybrid through cultural experience.”
Another room, Community, highlights the importance of community in its different forms—artistic, blood and chosen. “You see this in portraits of fellow artists, in depictions of dance communities and in works that reflect the chaos and intimacy of family life,” Alvarez says.
The final section, Land/tierra, focuses on artists whose practices engage with land and the built environment, going beyond ecological concerns to address questions of belonging and land use at both material and imaginary levels. “It’s about the relationship between identity and place—how where you live shapes you and how people shape the places they inhabit,” Alvarez explains, noting that she deliberately moved away from the term landscape, which is historically tied to imperialism. “These works instead give agency to land itself—using materials like soil and charcoal, or rethinking ideas like the promised land.”
Poetry is an important presence throughout the show, with a poem accompanying each section. A line from former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera inspired the title. Alvarez first encountered it years ago, and as she searched for a title, she realized it perfectly captured the idea of gathering, abundance and multiplicity. She then invited Herrera to write a new poem inspired by the exhibition. “I shared an early checklist, and he responded with a much longer, almost epic poem,” she says. Excerpts from both poems are integrated into each section, offering a more poetic approach to the themes.
The exhibition does not prescribe a fixed path. Its structure is intentionally porous, allowing works to resonate across multiple sections. “Many works could belong in multiple sections, and that fluidity is intentional,” Alvarez explains. “The goal is not to define a movement but to broaden the conversation—to move beyond narrow geographic or thematic frameworks and instead look across the diaspora.”
Despite its breadth, Alvarez acknowledges the impossibility of full representation. “If I filled the entire building, there would still be more who could be part of this conversation,” she notes. “That’s something I keep emphasizing in my tours, and that also comes through in the catalog: this is just the tip of the iceberg. It is the beginning of a conversation about what it means to be a contemporary Latinx painter today.”
From here, Alvarez reflects, the museum can move in many directions, including more focused solo exhibitions that build on the context this show provides. The exhibition will travel within the U.S., with the potential to expand further—possibly to Latin America or Europe—extending the conversation around its central concerns while highlighting the richness and diversity of creative expression across the Latino diaspora worldwide, in all its beauty and complexity.