Burning the Mask
Featuring works by eleven artists, curated by Patricia Encarnación, Burning the Mask interrogates the entangled formations of race and ethnicity across Latinx diasporas. Visit the exhibition at 20 Cooper Square, 1st Floor Gallery, through May 15 (Tuesday-Friday, 11am-5pm). Join us for the opening celebration on March 19, 2026. Please RSVP here. The exhibition is free and open to the public with an RSVP.
Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Burning the Mask interrogates the entangled formations of race and ethnicity across Latinx diasporas, especially as today’s political climate intensifies border violence, racialized surveillance, culture-war governance, and renewed demands for “good” minority performance. Featuring works by Abigail Lucien, Brenda Barrios, Coco Fusco, Emmanuel Massillon, Hazel Batrezchavez, Jeffrey Meris, Karlo Ibarra, Lizania Cruz, Santiago Forero, Vincent Valdez, and Yvette Mayorga, the exhibition foregrounds practices that confront imposed identities by metaphorically “burning” the mask through acts rooted in ancestrality, embodied authenticity, and radical love. Against the coercive promise of assimilation, this exhibition echoes Fanon’s refusal: “I am not the slave of the slavery that dehumanized my ancestors”.
Positioned at the confluence of Abya Yala and Caribbean diasporic epistemologies, Burning the Mask surfaces the heterogeneity of Latinx identifications while exposing the historical, sociocultural, and geopolitical forces that discipline them. It traces how assimilationist scripts—whitening, respectability politics, anti-Black distancing, and “model minority” legibility—do not simply fail to protect our communities; they can backfire, reproducing internal hierarchies and trading proximity to power for the abandonment of the most vulnerable. Here, the mask is a personal metaphor and a social technology: a demand to translate oneself into the language of dominance even when that order remains structurally invested in exclusion.
Through Fanon’s analytic lens, the exhibition frames identity as relational, contested, and in motion. An ongoing collective praxis of becoming grounded in solidarity, self-determination, and love as political practice.
-Patricia Encarnación
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About the Curator
Patricia Encarnación (she/they) is an Afro-Caribbean, New York City–based interdisciplinary artivist and scholar whose work challenges colonial tropes in Caribbean culture through an anti-colonial lens. Encarnación has participated in multiple residencies, including The Shed, Smack Mellon (as a Van Lier Fellow), MuseumsQuartier Vienna, Kovent Catalonia, and the Silver Arts Project at the World Trade Center. Their work has been recognized by CIFO, the NALAC Fund for the Arts, and the Centro León Jiménez Biennial, where Encarnación received the City of Cádiz (Spain) cultural immersion prize and a second fellowship in Martinique through the Tropiques Atrium Caribbean art program. Exhibitions of their work include Documenta 15, the Tribeca Artists Award Program, the Hudson River Museum, the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), the NADA Art Fair, and the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA). In addition to actively exhibiting, Encarnación has pursued curatorial projects at New York University (NYU), the Centro de la Imagen (CDMX), the Bronx Museum, ChaShaMa, WOPHA Miami, and alternative gallery spaces in NYC, Miami, and the Dominican Republic. Encarnación earned a full-tuition scholarship for a BFA at Parsons School of Design (The New School) and was awarded the MacCracken Fellowship for graduate studies in Caribbean and Latin American Museum Studies at New York University.
Visit the Exhibition
20 Cooper Square Gallery, 3rd floor
March 19 - May 15, 2026
Tuesday - Friday, 11 am - 5 pm
The exhibition is free and open to the public with RSVP. Non-NYU guests can click here to schedule their visit.
Group and class visits: Please email latinxproject@nyu.edu to schedule a group visit or tour.
Accessibility note: Non-NYU guests may be asked to present a government-issued ID for access to the third floor. The third floor gallery is accessible via elevator. All-gender restrooms are available.
Questions? Please email latinxproject@nyu.edu.
Supporters
Burning the Mask is made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.