Q&A with Patricia Encarnación, 2026 Guest Curator

The Latinx Project is thrilled to announce the selection of Patricia Encarnación as the winner of the Curatorial Open Call for the 2025-26 academic year. In this interview, meet the curator and learn more about their practice as they prepare for their exhibition opening in March 2026.

TLP: First off, congratulations on being the winner of our latest Curatorial Open Call. Can you share a bit about your most recent curatorial involvements?

My overall practice reflects on the quotidian, drawing inspiration from material culture. Through everyday imagery, objects, and landscapes, I employ a visual language that both (re)constructs and challenges the often-skewed global perceptions of Global Majority communities, especially of “Caribbean-ness.”

Ultimately, my curatorial work has focused on fostering trans-Caribbean, Abya Yala, and diasporic dialogues across the geographies of the Global Majority. I moderated a public panel in Puerto Rico as part of MAC en el Barrio, titled Caribe Común, where artists, curators, organizers, and scholars came together to share strategies for sustainable cultural practices that are embedded in and accountable to the community.

Alongside that, I’ve been amplifying my curatorial platform, Ojos Caribe, which centers a Caribbean lens that documents the region through a critical, political-cultural, and sensitive eye. Now in its thirteenth edition, the project focuses on screening Caribbean video art and short films. Our 11th edition—Burdened Lands: Environmental Crises and the Empire—took place at NYU’s Espacio de Culturas screening room and focused on the ongoing ecological violence and extractivism burdening our region, while invoking radical imagination as resistance. The 10th edition, A Lens on Pride and Caribbean Heritage Month, “put the lens on” queer Caribbean lineages in collaboration with The Clemente. Most recently, the 12th edition, I’m Not Your Colony, was hosted by El Lobi in San Juan during Art Hub, expanding the conversation on colonial residues and creative refusal. The upcoming 13th edition will take place as part of the public program at The Shed’s open call exhibition, Portals, exploring forms of radical love.

Each edition of Ojos Caribe is intentionally rooted in the needs and visions of our communities, always creating space for cultural nourishment, healing, and political memory.

I’m truly honored and excited to continue building with the TLP Family.

TLP: Tell us about your forthcoming exhibition with TLP. What do you want people to take away from it?

Burning the Mask, inspired by Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, confronts the crisis of assimilation and the violence that enforces conformity to whiteness and other hegemonic norms, while celebrating the joy found in resisting them. The exhibition brings together a constellation of Latinx artists whose practices confront imposed identities—not by simply rejecting them, but by transforming them into something rooted in ancestral memory, embodied truth, and radical love.

What I hope people take away is a sense that identity is not something we owe to systems of recognition or visibility. Latinx identity is not a monolith; it is constantly being negotiated at the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and geography. This exhibition invites us to see identity as something relational and in motion, not as a fixed box or a curated performance.

Rather than offering a neat narrative of representation, Burning the Mask encourages viewers to sit with discomfort, contradiction, and multiplicity. It asks: What happens when we refuse the scripts handed to us? How can art help us imagine identities that are liberatory, unruly, and grounded in the community rather than conformity?

At its core, this project is a celebration of becoming—of burning what no longer serves us and making space for new, collective ways of being.

TLP: What inspires your overall practice as an independent curator, artist, and museum advocate?

My work looks into the practices born from the unfinished project of liberation and the quotidian ways our communities build meaning in the face of structural violence. I look closely at Caribbean material culture—the “ordinary” objects and gestures that carry memory, resistance, and an alternate sense of time. These traces guide how I move—as a curator, artist, and advocate.

Across Abya Yala, the Caribbean, and its diasporas, I’m drawn to how people create spaces of refusal and care. The work of artists and cultural organizers who treat art as relation—not spectacle—grounds me. Their practices offer tools for healing, critique, and radical joy.

What keeps me committed is the possibility of transformation. I’m not interested in visibility within broken systems—I’m interested in changing how we are held, how we remember and relate to our histories, how we preserve our cultures, and how we imagine futures together.

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About Patricia Encarnación

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.

About the Latinx Project at NYU

The Latinx Project at New York University explores and promotes U.S. Latinx Art, Culture and Scholarship through creative and interdisciplinary programs. Founded in 2018, it serves as a platform to foster critical public programming and for hosting artists and scholars. The Latinx Project is especially committed to examining and highlighting the multitude of Latinx identities as central to developing a more inclusive and equitable vision of Latinx Studies.

Supporters

The 2025-26 Curatorial Open Call is made possible with support from the Mellon Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.