Discover Artists Where They Are: Speaking with Elizabeth Ferrer

I first met Elizabeth Ferrer in 1986, after I was a potential pupil within the graduate program in Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and she or he was directing the division’s newly opened Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery. A yr later, putting in the exhibitions on the Wallach turned my work-study job and Ferrer turned my boss. She additionally turned my mentor, and I spent the primary ten years or extra of my life in New York both working for her, together with her, or at different jobs for which she had advisable me. She has had a distinguished profession in artwork, directing establishments, curating important exhibitions, and producing pathbreaking publications. Her scholarship has lengthy targeted on the artwork of the Spanish-speaking Americas, notably the historical past of pictures in Mexico. 

More just lately, she has turned to Latinx artwork within the U.S., producing the main e book Latinx Photography within the United States (University of Washington Press, 2021), the primary survey of its type, and Louis Carlos Bernal: Monografía (Aperture and The Center for Creative Photography, 2024), a retrospective of the Latino photographer that The New York Times named the most effective artwork books of 2024. Her forthcoming exhibition, Chicano Camera Culture: A Photographic History, 1966 to 2026, will open at The Cheech Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside, California, on February 7, 2026. I talked with Ferrer by e-mail between October 20 and December 15, 2025. Our dialog has been flippantly edited for brevity and readability.

Joseph R. Wolin (JRW): In the late Nineteen Eighties and early ‘90s, you, like so many others, turned deeply all for artwork from Latin America, which had beforehand not been seen a lot within the mainstream United States artwork world, besides in matches and begins over the many years. What do you keep in mind because the driving forces behind your curatorial and demanding route in these years, and in regards to the common shift in attitudes that put Latin American artwork again on the map, so to talk, the place it has remained?

Elizabeth Ferrer (EF): I arrived in New York within the Nineteen Eighties with a level in artwork historical past, however with basically no contacts and little information of the up to date artwork scene. During my first few years within the metropolis, I labored in museum schooling and public programming, however I used to be wanting to curate and spent as a lot time as I might discovering my manner into the artwork scene. I went to galleries and different areas, started assembly artists, and started curating on a contract foundation. I used to be additionally changing into conscious of Latino artists domestically through exhibitions at El Museo del Barrio and areas just like the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, then in SoHo. By the late ‘80s, up to date artwork from Mexico was getting some publicity in New York and elsewhere, and this fascinated me as a Mexican American from East Los Angeles. I used to be acquainted with the Chicano artwork scene and had witnessed the murals being painted in my neighborhood after I was a child, however I knew little of Mexican artwork. When I studied artwork historical past, the main target was profoundly Eurocentric, and there have been few alternatives to check Mexican or Latin American artwork historical past within the United States on the time. My tutorial background, in actual fact, is in early Italian Renaissance artwork.

In the late Nineteen Eighties, I made a decision to easily go to Mexico City. I had some household there however no skilled contacts. In retrospect, my naiveté served me nicely. I arrived at galleries as a New York curator, then directing the Wallach Gallery in its nascent years, and defined to gallerists that I deliberate to prepare a big exhibition of latest Mexican artists. That a lot was true, however I had no sponsor and no dedication from any establishment. Fortunately, doorways opened for me. Over the course of some visits, I met dozens of artists, artwork sellers, and others concerned in what was a vibrant artwork scene. Independent Curators International (ICI) agreed to prepare and tour the present I curated, Through the Path of Echoes: Contemporary Art in Mexico. It traveled to seven museums within the United States, starting in 1990, together with El Museo del Barrio [and two venues in Texas: the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, now the Blanton Museum of Art, in Austin and the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi. I followed this up with A Shadow Born of Earth: New Photography in Mexico, an exhibition that was organized by the American Federation of Arts and that also traveled widely. So I was on my way, staking an interest in a territory of art that was still largely overlooked.

While I was organizing the ICI exhibition, I met Fatima Bercht, then Director of Visual Arts at the Americas Society in New York. Fatima invited me to work there, initially, as a part-time exhibition coordinator. This opened up a much wider world for me. The gallery’s program is dedicated to art of the Americas — the entire continent — and through my eight-year association with the organization I gained an invaluable education in Latin American art. I eventually became curator and then director of the department, and organized exhibitions of modern and contemporary art from places as diverse as Bolivia and the Dominican Republic.

I realize now that my trajectory in Mexican and, more broadly, Latin American art, was in part due to exceptionally good timing. I became involved in the Mexican art scene just a few years before the 1992 Columbus Quincentennial, an anniversary that prompted scores of exhibitions of Mexican art in the United States, including a few that I was involved with. Thanks to this growing interest in Mexico, I was able to turn my attention to historic projects, including retrospective exhibitions and publications on two modernists, the painter María Izquierdo and the photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo. And the wider field of Latin American art was also receiving much greater attention in the 1990s. In 1993, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) presented the most extensive survey of Latin American art ever assembled, Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century. Its curator, Waldo Rasmussen, invited Fatima Bercht and myself to act as co-editors of the accompanying publications. This was a defining experience for me, to work with leading scholars in the field and with MoMA. Amid all these opportunities, I gained an understanding of the web of interests and factors that shape what we see and how we see it. Curators, of course, play a crucial role in reassessing art history and representing it in a more inclusive way.

JRW: As far back as 1993, with the AFA exhibition A Shadow Born of Earth, photography has formed a critical part of your curatorial practice. What drew you to photography as a distinct medium and discipline within modern and contemporary art? Why did the histories and character of Mexican and Latin American photography capture and hold your attention?

EF: Photography began to draw me as an adolescent. I did not have access to fine art photography, but I spent a lot of time looking at the photo essays in Life magazine and I later began to find books on classic photographers like Margaret Bourke-White, Diane Arbus, Edward Weston, and Dorothea Lange. In college in Los Angeles, I learned about newer forms of photography and was fascinated by a more local school of practitioners who were moving away from straightforward documentation, whether towards more subjective forms of street photography or towards conceptual languages. There were many — Gary Winogrand, Lewis Baltz, Robert Heinecken, Darryl Curran, Ed Ruscha. At Immaculate Heart College, I studied with Claire Henze, an enormously talented photographer who died relatively young. Women photographers were much less visible, but I recall a visit to my college from Judy Dater, whose work also suggested new approaches. Latinx photographers were simply not part of my education; those active at the time became celebrated much later in life.

All of it fascinated me — the way a single image could say so much about a time and place. And I was struck by the vitality of this local community. Photography seemed to be a much more democratic realm than painting, which was so strongly associated with New York at the time. I studied photography seriously for a couple of years and helped put myself through school as a rock-and-roll photographer. I published pretty regularly in weekly alternative newspapers in LA, but I never quite saw this as a way of life for myself. I never had the temperament to be out there, constantly promoting my work and being evaluated by others. I do remain pleased by the work I made back then; it is simply one of those paths not taken.

I discovered Mexican photography much later, when I first traveled to Mexico in the late 1980s with the idea of curating an exhibition of contemporary Mexican art for U.S. venues. During one of my first gallery visits, I encountered the work of Flor Garduño, then a young photographer and now one of the leading photographers there. I bought my first photo at that show, and the gallerist, Benjamin Diaz, introduced me to Flor, as well as to her mentor, the photographer Mariana Yampolsky. Based on the strength of their work and that of a few others I became familiar with, I decided to return to Mexico to curate an exhibition of contemporary Mexican photography. While working on this in the early 1990s, I took a deep dive into the Mexican photography scene and discovered a remarkable community. 

At that time, documentary and street photography remained prevalent, but there were younger photographers, such as Gerardo Suter, Eugenia Vargas, and Adolfo Patiño, who were doing more experimental work. I included both modes in the exhibition, finding that photographers in Mexico in that era were linked by similar iconography and concerns. They were using photography to understand the relation of contemporary society to an ancient past, to think about the impact of colonization and Catholicism on Mexican identity, and to document the current state of Mexican society. 

Photography was also ideally suited for portraying the growing queer community, those who lived in the margins, and the reality of Indigenous lives. In other words, I found this photography to be incredibly relevant as well as endlessly creative. And it has continued to hold my attention. I later researched, wrote, and lectured on historic photographers, including Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Lola Álvarez Bravo, as well as the two legendary foreigners in Mexico — Edward Weston and Tina Modotti. They had created the strong foundation on which the younger generation, which so impressed me, had built.

JRW: More recently, you have turned away somewhat from the internationalism of your previous work and focused more on art and photography produced here, publishing the first and now definitive history on the topic of Latinx Photography in the United States and a monograph to accompany the retrospective of the long overlooked Arizona photographer Louis Carlos Bernal. At the same time, you have curated projects like Latinx Abstract in 2021, which was also the first exhibition of painting and other mediums to survey the field. 

What led to this shift in your attention, from Mexico and the larger Latin American scene in general to the art and photography that grows out of various communities here at home?

EF: These shifts reflect a couple of concerns and interests as I have evolved as a curator. While I had some wonderful opportunities to work with Mexican photography past and present, I increasingly felt that I had had my say, that it was time to move on. At the same time, I was becoming increasingly cognizant of the fact that Latinx photographers closer to home, whether in New York or other parts of the United States, were severely overlooked. This was at a time when it was easier to go to a commercial gallery or a museum and see work by Mexican photographers rather than Latinx artists involved with the medium.

As early as the mid-1990s, I had begun to do some projects with the Bronx-based photographers’ organization En Foco, although initially, focusing on Mexican photography. In 1995, I edited a special mentor issue of their magazine, Nueva Luz, dedicated to Mariana Yampolsky. I was also invited to participate in portfolio reviews and other programs, which introduced me to many photographers in New York who were not getting opportunities to exhibit their work more broadly.

During the same period, FotoFest in Houston invited me to write a catalog for a major exhibition, the first of its kind, American Voices: Latino Photography in the U.S., which included work by Chicanx, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American photographers from around the United States. While the catalog never came to fruition, the project allowed me to take a deep dive and realize there was much to be done in terms of documenting and interpreting this work.

It took a while, but, by the 2010s, I was finally able to more seriously devote myself to a book-length study of the history of Latinx photography. This involved years of research and writing but it needed to be done. Latinx photographers have been essentially absent from the history of American photography. The overwhelmingly positive response to the book demonstrated the need for this kind of study; it is now widely used in curricula of Latinx art. And it provided a foundation for subsequent exhibitions, publications, etc., including the exhibition on Bernal, known as “the father of Chicano photography,” presented at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in 2024.

Latinx Abstract was an exhibition I organized as Chief Curator at BRIC, a nonprofit art space in downtown Brooklyn. Here, as with Latinx photography, I wanted to bring to light what has been overlooked, unseen. While Latinx art in general has received significant exposure in the last several years, abstraction by these artists has not. And it has a tremendous history, including iconic figures like Carmen Herrera and Fanny Sanín, both painters who gained recognition quite late in life. I was familiar with many other Latinx artists in New York dedicated to abstraction, beginning with Freddy Rodríguez, whose first works made in New York in the 1970s comprise exquisite, hard-edge abstractions. In fact, my very first studio visit as a young curator was to Freddy’s studio, in a very pre-gentrified Williamsburg. The exhibition included members of this older generation, including Sanín and Rodríguez, as well as younger figures. My original goal was to organize a show of artists from across the country, but the COVID-19 pandemic got in the way, and we ultimately focused on New York artists. It was a stunning exhibition, one that truly demonstrated the vitality of abstraction among Latinx artists over the last few decades.

JRW: What role has Texas played in your thinking? You were the Director of the Austin Museum of Art (now The Contemporary Austin) from 1997 to 2001 and you have worked with, and written about, a number of Texas artists and photographers, including, memorably for me, a catalog essay on the late, great Chuck Ramirez in 2017. 

How does art made in Texas fit into your ideas about the broader picture of Latinx photography?

EF: Texas marked a dividing line in my career. I had lived in New York for 17 years and had worked at the Americas Society for nearly half that time. It seemed time for a change. There was a lot of buzz about Austin then, and AMOA, as it was known, presented a wonderful opportunity in its plan to construct a new building. When I arrived in the city, there was so much optimism in the air about the way the tech industry was fueling Austin’s growth. But large-scale philanthropy had yet to become a practice and, once the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, it became clear that an ambitious new building was unfeasible. I learned a lot from that experience and made some dear friends in Austin, but it was time to return to NYC. Once 9/11 occurred, I felt more than ever that New York was my city.

Nevertheless, my experiences getting to know artists and art communities in Texas played a crucial role in the way I think about Chicano and, more broadly, Latinx art. Texas takes great pride in its art history and contemporary art scene, but, with few exceptions, it is underrecognized elsewhere. There is a history of Chicano art focused on San Antonio, for example, that is largely unfamiliar to West Coast Chicanos. Similarly, from the vantage point of a New Yorker who was born and raised in Los Angeles and returns there often, I continually see the disparities of how Latinx art is understood. The history of art by members of the Puerto Rican diaspora is little known on the West Coast and, likewise, Chicano art has had only a modicum of exposure on the East Coast. 

All this is to say that Texas deepened my knowledge of Latinx art; it made me appreciate that even “Chicano art” encompasses multiple communities and histories. The reality is that, increasingly, Latinx artists are based all over the United States, not just in New York and LA. I have underscored this fact in the exhibition that I am now curating on the history of Chicano photography for The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, in Riverside, California. While the majority of photographers in the show reside in southern California, we will also include artists based in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Indiana, Illinois, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York. My Texas experience encouraged me to do the research and find artists where they are.

JRW: What is the scope of your upcoming project at The Cheech and how does it fit into your evolving thoughts about Latinx photography? Where do you go from here?

EF: The exhibition Chicano Camera Culture: A Photographic History, 1966 to 2026 will open at The Cheech in early February. It is a big show with 44 photographers and about 150 works and will be the first to fully survey photography by Chicanos from the Chicano Civil Rights Era to the present day. It will also have a major catalog, with essays by me and five other authors.

My book on Latinx photography was necessarily broad and, while writing it, I knew I wanted to delve deeper into specific aspects of this history. Since that time, I curated the Bernal retrospective, published essays about the photographers Maximo Colón and Sophie Rivera, lectured about Puerto Rican photographers in New York, and so on. But I have long wanted to organize an exhibition of Chicano photography because there is so much remarkable work and because it is a far less recognized aspect of Chicano art history. I believe the show will fascinate and surprise people. A few of the photographers in the show have national reputations — Bernal, Laura Aguilar, and Harry Gamboa Jr., for example — but the exhibition will offer a lot of revelations. The Cheech has really embraced the project. Cheech Marin himself has primarily collected paintings, but he has become interested in photography and I believe the show will also lead to more acquisitions in this medium by the institution.

As to where I go from here, I have a few more writing projects to pursue. I am a member of the Raquel Rabinovich Trust, dedicated to preserving the legacy of the Argentine painter who was based in New York, and will help develop a monographic study of her long career. Beyond that, I see a lot of travel in my future.