Media

Glasstire, Verónica Gaona on Her Shifting Art Practice and the Role of Artist Residencies

Over the last few years, Brownsville-born, Houston-based artist Verónica Gaona has been a rising star of the Texas art scene. She has received the Latinx Artist Fellowship Award (2023) and Chispa Award (2022) from the U.S. Latinx Art Forum, and the Houston Artadia Award (2021). Since 2019, she has participated in residencies in Nantes, France; Marfa, Houston, and Brownsville, Texas; and Brooklyn, New York.

*Verónica Gaona. Photo Courtesy: Beatriz Bellorin/Courtesy PAC Residency, Houston, 2024*

ARTnews, El Museo del Barrio Names Artist List for Its 2024 Triennial, with an Expanded, Global Focus

By Maximilíano Durón (Link: ARTnews)

El Museo del Barrio has named the 33 artists that will take part in the second edition of its triennial, which will run at the museum from October 10, 2024, to February 9, 2025. This year, the exhibition will take the title “Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024” and be curated by El Museo’s chief curator Rodrigo Moura and curator Susanna V. Temkin, and guest curator María Elena Ortiz, who is a curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas.

Curators — *The curatorial team for the 2024 edition of La Trienal: from left, Susana V. Temkin, Rodrigo Moura, and María Elena Ortiz. Photo Courtesy CASEY KELBAUGH.*

ISCP, Artist at Work: Verónica Gaona with Curator Alex Santana

Link: (International Studio & Curatorial Program)

For this Artists at Work, ISCP artist-in-residence Verónica Gaona will be joined by writer and curator Alex Santana. Gaona will present on her practice and speak with Santana about her interest in the relationships between architecture, truck culture and migration. They will also discuss the ephemeral material and spatial transformations produced and accelerated by migration and remittances.

National Gallery of Art, Latinx Art and the Intimacy of Dislocation, Wyeth Lecture in American Art, 2023

Roberto Tejada (Link: National Gallery of Art)

Artists, lawmakers, and the media continue to grapple with a category problem that inadequately defines Latine/a/o/x experience as well as the cultural contradictions encapsulated in an archive of visual practices that spans well over five decades. If we look closely at an intergenerational cross section of artists and their work, we can begin to compare multimedia narratives and geographical particulars, encouraging a meta-historical view.

The colonization of the Caribbean and Americas, together with its present-day vestiges, endures as a persistent theme for Latinx artists who seek to address the social and ecological catastrophes that constitute the contemporary condition.

This talk considers visual encounters unique to Latinx lifeways but that contest US American geopolitics and the uneven distributions of modern life. A corpus of Latinx art can be seen as a crossway of intersecting cultural and political attributes—intimacies in dislocation that inflect a dissenting perspective and overturn the casual or cursory cultural account.

ARTnews, $50,000 Latinx Artist Fellowships Go to Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Ester Hernandez, Postcommodity, and More

By Maximilíano Durón (Link: ARTnews)

The US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF) has announced the third group of winners of its annual Latinx Artist Fellowship, which is supported by the Ford and Mellon Foundations through 2025.

Established in 2021, the Latinx Artist Fellowship was created to honor the practices of Latinx artists, who have historically been under-recognized by mainstream institutions, and to help support their careers, in the form of unrestricted grants of $50,000 per artist. (The fellowship is part of the larger Latinx Art Visibility Initiative, led by Ford and Mellon, that also helps fund museum curators specializing in Latinx art.)

Glasstire, The U.S. Latinx Art Forum Announces 2023 Latinx Artist Fellows

By Jessica Fuentes (Link: Glasstire)

The U.S. Latinx Art Forum (USLAF), an advocacy organization, has announced the recipients of its 2023 Latinx Artist Fellowship grants of $50,000, including two artists with Texas connections.

Verónica Gaona. Photo Courtesy of the artist.

Sigo Tumbado, Sigo Coronando: Verónica Gaona with art historian and cultural critic Roberto Tejada

(Link: Lawndale Art and Performance Center)

In Sigo Tumbado, Sigo Coronando, Verónica Gaona explores characteristics of transnationality, impermanence, and monumentality across international borders. By using trokiando aesthetics, Gaona reveals spatial practices of migrant families and the desire to concretize immortal significance. Gaona employs her iconic Ford F-150 truck, burn out marks, polarized tinted window glass, aluminum images, and vinyl to resolve fragmented memories, subvert systems of power, and solidify a place of belonging in the Mexican landscape.

Roberto Tejada and Veronica Gaona. Photo Courtesy of Lawndale Art and Performance Center.

Houston’s Verónica Gaona talks death, diaspora, and truck burnouts in Lawndale show

Verónica Gaona, For Those Who Do Not Return in Life, There Is Always Death (Homage to David Gomez), F150 truck burnout performance, 2021 at Lawndale Art and Performance Center. Photo Courtesy of the artist.

Jef Rouner (Link: Houston Chronicle)

The United States and Mexico are two countries divided by a wall, both physical (in places) and spiritual. Houston artist Verónica Gaona has been wondering what happens to the souls of Mexican immigrants who die north of the Rio Grande and want to return home, and she is prepared to answer that question with vehicular burnouts around the Lawndale Art and Performance Center using tricked out Ford F-150s.

The performance piece is called “for those who do not return in life there is always death” and is an off-shoot of the current “Sites of Memory” exhibit at the DiverseWorks Gallery. Inspired by Mexican vigils, the first 30 minutes involve music, drinks, and food as attendees stand watch over the trucks. Then, everyone will stand out of the way so that the trucks, covered in funeral flowers, can perform burnous across the parking lot, leaving a circular trail of dust and smoke. For this reason, audience members are asked to appear by 6:30 p.m. sharp for their safety.

Gaona, a child of Mexican immigrants as well as the artist-in-residence at Lawndale, was keen to use the trucks because of their importance in Mexican diaspora life.

Glasstire, Artadia Awards $10,000 to Verónica Gaona, Robert Hodge & Preetika Rajgariah

*Verónica Gaona, Robert Hodge, & Preetika Rajgariah. Photo Courtesy Artadia*

By Jessica Fuentes (Link: Glasstire)

Last month, the New York-based nonprofit Artadia announced the finalists for their 2021 Houston Awardees. Each finalist received a virtual studio visit with jurors Natalie Dupêcher, Assistant Curator of Modern Art at the Menil Collection, and PJ Gubatino Policarpio, independent curator, writer, and Manager of Youth Development at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Of the six finalists announced, Verónica Gaona, Robert Hodge, and Preetika Rajgariah were selected to receive the $10,000 prizes.