Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics: Arlene Dávila in conversation with Adriana Zavala

This conversation between Arlene Dávila and Adriana Zavala explores the arguments in Dávila's most recent book, Latinx Art: Artists, Markets, and Politics (Duke, 2020). Dávila, founding director of the Latinx Project at NYU, draws on numerous interviews with artists, dealers, and curators to explore the problem of visualizing Latinx art and artists. Providing an inside and critical look at the global contemporary art market, Dávila's book is at once an introduction to contemporary Latinx art and a call to decolonize the art worlds and practices that erase and whitewash Latinx artists. This conversation is the second of three events in a yearlong series at the Whitney focused on new scholarship about Latinx art and culture. Arlene Dávila is a professor of Anthropology and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and founding director of the Latinx Project at NYU. She studies the political economy of culture and media, consumption, immigration, and the geographies of inequality and race. She has authored six books, among them: Latino Spin, Public Image and the Whitewashing of Race (NYU Press), Culture Works: Space, Value and Mobility Across the Neoliberal Americas (NYU Press), and Latinx Art: Artists, Markets and Politics (Duke U Press). Adriana Zavala holds a Ph.D. in art history from Brown University. She is associate professor at Tufts University and holds a joint appointment in the departments of Art History and Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Studies. She is a founding co-director of the U.S. Latinx Art Forum, an organization dedicated to the art and art history of the U.S. Latinx community. Her book Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition: Women, Gender, and Representation in Mexican Art (PSU Press, 2010) won the Arvey Prize from the Association of Latin American Art in 2011.