Visions and Revisions
Hudson River Evening Sail. Artwork by Evelyn López de Guzmán. Cover design by Jessy Castillo.
This year’s printed volume––our fourth since Intervenxions’s commitment to the printed word in an inescapably digital world––coincides with The Latinx Project’s institutional reckoning with omissions from our shared canons of art history and culture. There has been considerable institutional attention on Puerto Rico (especially since 2017 after Hurricane María) but nowhere near enough scholarship on the important legacies of the Puerto Rican diaspora and all of its manifestations in varied contexts in the U.S. and elsewhere.
January 2025 marked the release of Nuyorican and Diasporican Visual Art: A Critical Anthology, an important compilation of texts on the underrecognized contributions of Puerto Rico’s diaspora on modern and contemporary art. This book emerged from the Nuyorican/Diasporican Art Conference that The Latinx Project hosted in 2022. Edited by Yasmin Ramirez and TLP’s founding director Arlene Dávila, this book inspired the adjacent exhibition RicanVisions: Global Ancestralities and Embodied Futures, The Latinx Project’s first internally organized show, cocurated by Ana-Hilda Figueroa de Jesús, Andrea Sofia Matos, and Xavier Robles Armas. Featuring 19 intergenerational artists, the exhibition spanned over 40 years of multidisciplinary visual cultural production. Both the compiled anthology and the exhibition mark an historic moment for the organization and for artists who have not yet received recognition.
One such figure––whose work was also a part of RicanVisions––is Evelyn López de Guzmán, who has been painting colorful, geometric abstractions for decades. In the 1970s, she studied under abstract expressionists like Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell, before being offered career opportunities by Louise Bourgeois. Ultimately, familial pressures led her to Washington D.C., where her exposure to the New York-centric art world waned over the years, overshadowing her long-standing accomplishments in the medium of abstract painting. Foregrounding the importance of her practice for the trajectory of art history, López de Guzmán’s vivid work is on the cover of this printed volume.
Through literature, performance, painting, comedy, film, photography, and theater, Volume 4 attempts a similar revisionist exercise, centering queer and trans figures and particularly women. Despite women making up roughly half of the population, parity is still an issue. This is as true in the art world—with men being overrepresented in galleries and art museums and their works selling for higher prices—as it is in other fields. With that sidelining comes a quieting of women’s voices, a loss for everyone.
However, even though the world doesn’t always stop and take notice, women are doing the work, sometimes relegated to the background or going undiscovered for years. This volume is a tribute to them. Focusing on art, criticism, filmmaking, comedy, and more, this publication features mostly women—with no caps on ages, disciplines, or any other quality that might otherwise disqualify them from receiving the coverage they deserve.
Within these pages, women are free to dream boldly, be vulnerable, and write their own rules. Within these pages they are revising the past and envisioning futures.
In the Flesh
So much of the artwork that resonates with us is corporeal. From music to dance to performance, our bodies hold lineages of emotional intelligence that we pass down over time, and most crucially, transmit to future generations.
Felipe Baeza’s approach to materiality in his experimental collage works draws heavily on the human form and its possibilities for expansion and refraction. In his works, he embeds queer futures with sacred images and icons of the past, while grounding them in the present through the physical accumulation of color and texture.
In her bodily approach to gestural abstraction, Awilda Sterling-Duprey uses improvisational dance and movement to translate sound into form and color. In response to the music of the African diaspora, Sterling-Duprey draws blindfolded onto black walls, puncturing the frame with vibrant hues, evoking constellations that are borne from the human body, a call-and-response amplified into space. Similarly, connecting two literary voices across geographies and time, poets Roque Raquel Salas Rivera and Oliver Baez Bendorf conjure transmasculine lineages through figurative language. Traversing shared affinities and calling out to other trans artists in their spheres of inspiration, the pair candidly discuss the role of expansive, embodied language and worldbuilding in their poetry.
The worlds of performance and theater have always intersected with activism––all modes of corporeal action and engagement meant to challenge the status quo and inspire new modes of thinking. A profile on a slice of New York City’s current queer Latinx comedy scene honors the legacy and interdisciplinary work of icons like Marga Gomez and Carmelita Tropicana.
Palimpsests
There are traces of you in expected and unexpected places—initials you carved onto a bannister, the scent of your perfume that lingers in the memory of a passerby long after you exit an elevator, or in the stories that your friends and acquaintances share with others. Much like a palimpsest, new moments replace old ones, but these vestiges may exist in one form or another.
In New York, boroughs like the Bronx and Brooklyn have undergone drastic changes. Los Sures, director Diego Echeverria’s 1984 documentary, documents the Puerto Rican madrinas in Williamsburg, who nurtured their community in the midst of uncertainty and strife. Similarly, in Cuban Roots/Bronx Stories: An Afro-Cuban Coming of Age Story, a 2000 documentary from Pam Sporn, a family of Cuban immigrants found its footing in the Bronx by turning to each other. The neighborhoods may be unrecognizable to the people in these documentaries—new families have moved in and more modern buildings may stand in the places that they once called home—but the streets that bore witness to them remain, though likely repaved and repaired since, and so do these films that allow us to see and learn a moment of time we may not have experienced firsthand.
For Cecile Chong, layer by layer, her art encompasses her Chinese-Ecuadorian-New Yorker identities. By seeking inspiration from all her experiences, she highlights our commonalities. Meanwhile, Rachelle Mozman Solano uses her family history and that of Panama and other Latin American countries to examine the legacy of colonialism, showcasing how even if hegemonic cultures suppress this connection, it still exists.
Lastly, this section ends with an interview with Denise Sandoval, a California-based scholar with encyclopedic-level knowledge of lowrider culture, particularly in the Los Angeles area. Sandoval has spent years uncovering the women who have always been a part of lowriding culture. In 2025, her research gave us Bajitas y Suavecitas, an exhibition that builds on the work she has accomplished throughout her career.
Regeneration
Repurposing is not a buzzy trend in our communities. It’s a way of life. It’s taking something that others might discard, overlook, or have a limited understanding of and giving it new meaning—a regeneration.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the DIY, punk, and avant-garde scene of East Los Angeles brought us The Brat, the Teresa Covarrubias–fronted band that subverted and challenged Chicano cultural and political norms. The moment was about Covarrubias being herself, not what others expected of her.
Covarrubias and her collaborators created makeshift spaces and art, a testament to their resourcefulness. This practice partially inspired Tomás Ybarra-Frausto to coin the term “Rasquachismo” in his seminal 1989 essay, “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility.” Years later, his frequent collaborator Amalia Mesa-Bains established the term “Domesticana,” the feminist version of Rasquache. In a conversation, the two discuss the inspirations behind these phrases that artists and scholars are still reinterpreting to this day.
However, this reimagination is not just limited to Chicanos. For example, Firelei Báez from the Dominican Republic uses old maps and documents that tell an incomplete history to fashion one that is more representative of Afro-diasporic identities. Meanwhile, Nuyorican artist Danielle De Jesus takes the dollar bill—a capitalist symbol—and imbues it with images of those who have faced negative consequences in a world that upholds the dollar over the wellbeing of people.
And then there’s abstract artist Evelyn López de Guzmán, who has spontaneously and continually reinvented herself throughout her career. While she got her start in New York City, life circumstances meant she had to start anew in the D.C. area. Then, there were other responsibilities that called her away from her art. Here, in her own words, she reshapes the existing narrative about her legacy.
Intervenxions Vol. 4 is out on Sept. 27 and will be available for sale online and at La Feria: Print Media Fair.