Introducing the Fall 2024 CCSRE-Cantor Latinx Art Fellows
Latinx artists make up the largest demographic conspicuously absent from mainstream art spaces, leading to long-term implications for how they are perceived and positioned within the academy and the broader art community. Advancing counter-narratives —through academic writing, lecture, and dialogue— is essential for enhancing the visibility of Latinx artists and their practices.
The CCSRE-Cantor Latinx Art Fellowship Program offers space, voice, and visibility to scholars of Latinx art and artists who have the potential to drive such meaningful discourse but who too have been denied access to influential spaces.
With the financial support of the Centering Race in the Arts and Humanities Consortium (CRC) and in collaboration with the Cantor Arts Center, the CCSRE Research Institute, is pleased to welcome the recipients of the Fall 2024 CCSRE-Cantor Latinx Art Fellowship. Three emerging scholars of Latinx art—Gabriela Rodriguez-Gomez (UCLA), Libbi Ponce (UCLA), and Fernanda Espinosa (Rutgers)— will be in-residence at CCSRE to conduct research on the Dwelling – New Acquisitions exhibition at the Cantor Museum and the Amalia Mesa-Bains Archive at Stanford Special Collections. During their residency, these fellows will also make meaningful contributions to CCSRE as they join us for Research Institute events and share their work with Stanford faculty, staff and students and the wider community of artists, academics, and interested public.
Please join us for their final fellowship talks and submit your RSVP below. All are welcome and refreshments will be served.
Fernanda Espinosa
Dwelling the America(s)
Thursday, November 14
4:00-5:30pm
CCSRE Conference Room, Building 360
Fernanda is a first-year American Studies PhD student at Rutgers University – Newark, where she is a Presidential Graduate Fellow. Fernanda holds a master’s degree in oral history from Columbia University. She has held fellowships with the Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities – Oral History Association, where she has conducted projects on Latinx art. She is a co-founder and collaborator of Circular Projects, dedicated to working at the intersections of language justice, research, and oral history, and of CC1/19 — an itinerant visual art and oral transmissions collaboration. Fernanda’s research interests include diaspora aesthetics and memory and Latinx artists and art in the United States.
Libbi Ponce
Material Poetics in ektor garcia's Work
Monday, December 2
4:00pm-5:30pm
CCSRE Conference Room, Building 360
Libbi Ponce (they/them, she/her) is an Ecuadorian artist, born in 1997 to a family of musicians, making sculptures, 360-degree videos, and installations. Ponce explores themes of Latinx-Futurism through a sculptural practice of world-building incorporating an ambitious range of materials including steel, bronze, resin, polyurethane, mortar, grout, terracotta, and glass. Inspired by the zoomorphic motifs from ancient Andean ceramics, Ponce constructs tactile sculptural objects which probe discourse on grief, intimacy, and historic folklore.
They have attended the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Oxbow Artists' Residency, Yale Norfolk Undergraduate Residency, and ACRE. Exhibitions include terciopelo at Selenas Mountain, BASE REMOVED at the Museo Antropológico y de Arte Contemporáneo, and Skyway 20/21 at the Tampa Museum of Art. They hold a BFA in Studio Art and BA in Philosophy from the University of South Florida. In 2021, Ponce completed a Fulbright Creative Research Fellowship in Ecuador. In 2023, they completed an ArtTable research fellowship at the Chrysler Museum Of Art. Libbi is the founder/director of galeria juniin in Guayaquil, Ecuador and Co-Director of Coco Hunday Gallery in Tampa, FL. Libbi is currently an MFA candidate in Sculpture at UCLA on the Graduate Opportunity Program Fellowship. Ponce lives and works in Los Angeles.
Gabriela Rodriguez-Gomez
Cantor Arts Center’s Collection of Chicana/o/x Art, Honoring Dr. Amalia Mesa-Bains
Monday, December 2
4:00-5:30pm
CCSRE Conference Room, Building 360
Gabriela Rodriguez-Gomez is a social art historian, artist, and Ph.D. candidate in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o & Central American Studies at the University of CaliforniaLos Angeles (UCLA). Her dissertation, “Murals Without Walls, Muralism Without Borders: Womxn Artists and Their Portable Murals of the Chicano Art Movement in Colorado and California,” examines the history of womxn artists and muralism in the U.S. and Mexico, focusing on portable or moveable murals of the Chicano/a art movement since the mid-1960s to today. She holds a B.A. in Art and History of Art and Visual Culture from the University of California Santa Cruz, an M.A. in Art History from the University of California Riverside, and an M.A. in Chicana/o Studies from UCLA. She received the 2023-2024 UC President’s Pre-Professoriate Fellowship, which is part of the UC-Hispanic Serving Institutions Doctoral Diversity Initiative (UC-HSI DDI). She is currently finishing her dissertation under the auspices of 2024-2025 UCLA Graduate Education Dissertation Year Award.