Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art

This large-format catalog produced to accompany a traveling exhibition of the same name contains two powerful essays, an exhibition checklist, and a detailed bibliography. An introductory essay by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, an independent scholar of Latin American and U.S. Latino arts and cultures, elaborates on the exhibition's conceptual premise, the construction and instability of the category of Latino art, and the advocacy for a framing of Latino art within the canon of American art. The second essay by Ramos, curator of Latino Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, articulates the impossibility of divorcing identity politics from the monumental task of representing Latino art as a singular and monolithic movement. The pages called "commentaries," complied by Ramos and colleagues Jennifer L. Bauman and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, among others, offer brief biographies of key artists followed by succinct discussion. These are accompanied by small black-and-white or full-color reproductions of selected works. Artwork included in the catalog and featured in the exhibition represents the Smithsonian's collecting efforts, largely begun in the 1990s, marking a nearly 200-year legacy of absence in permanent collections and American cultural patrimony. The title serves as a handsomely produced souvenir of the Smithsonian's efforts at this inclusive exhibition but represent only a fraction of the public debates generated by the show.