Buffalo AKG’s New Exhibition Reframes Latinx Painting Through “Pinturx”
In the galleries of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, a new exhibition is asking a deceptively simple question: What counts as painting when the story being told is shaped by migration, displacement, and the daily negotiations of diaspora?
Curated by Andrea Alvarez, “Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way” brings together works that treat painting not as a fixed medium but as a flexible language. Alvarez, who previously organized Latinx-focused exhibitions including “Comunidades Visibles: The Materiality of Migration” (2021), described the project during a preview as the “boldest statement” of her career.
“It is a declaration that we as Latinx people are here, that we take up space, that we are part of the dialogue of what is happening in contemporary art and in the contemporary world, and that it merits attention,” Alvarez said. She added that the exhibition’s stakes extend beyond Latinx identity alone, arguing for visibility within major institutions for people whose worldviews have been shaped by movement across borders: “More broadly, it means that all those individuals who have experienced displacement, who have migrated around the world, whose worldviews are shaped by those experiences, also deserve to be seen and represented in spaces like these.”
Although the exhibition has the feel of a survey, Alvarez resists that label. Her stated aim is to think about Latinx painting “in expansive ways,” and to push against the disciplinary boundaries “inherited and passed down to us from the European and white American traditions.” The show is organized into thematic sections, but the categories are intentionally permeable — many works could plausibly shift from one grouping to another without losing their force.
Alvarez frames the exhibition through the concept of Pinturx, which she describes as a Latinx lens applied to “traditional, European-approved” genres of painting. The term signals both continuity and revision: a recognition of the histories embedded in portraiture, landscape, and devotional imagery, and a willingness to remake those forms from within.
A literary thread runs through the installation. Chicano poet Juan Felipe Herrera, whose 2008 poem gives the exhibition its title, wrote a new 68-page poem in response to the show. Excerpts appear throughout the galleries, functioning less as wall text than as a conceptual guide — a parallel narrative that moves alongside the artworks.
The exhibition’s most pointed gesture may be its refusal to treat “painting” as a narrow category. In keeping with Alvarez’s expansive approach, some works included are not paintings in any conventional sense, but they remain in conversation with painting’s histories of surface, image-making, and display.
One of the clearest examples is Justin Favela’s “St. Maarten (1972), After Marisol (2025–26),” a mural constructed from the colored tissue paper commonly used to make piñatas. The work references a seascape by Venezuelan American artist Marisol, who is prominently represented in the Buffalo AKG’s collection, and it extends Favela’s decades-long exploration of the piñata style.
Favela has described the origins of that approach as a response to the expectations placed on him as a student. “No one else was being asked to do that,” he said, recalling professors who urged him to make work explicitly about his Mexican Guatemalan heritage. “I thought to make a symbol representing Latinidad that would be so corny they would think I was making fun of the art world. But the piñata has so many layers — it’s about celebration, it’s about destruction. It automatically ties into Latino culture in the United States and everybody understands what that symbol means.”
For Favela, the museum context carries its own charge. He noted that “a lot of gallerists and professors told me I would never get into museums using tissue paper,” positioning the work’s inclusion as both an aesthetic proposition and a quiet rebuttal to gatekeeping.
Elsewhere, the exhibition turns directly to political realities that shape Latinx life in the United States. Karla Diaz’s “Uncle’s Crossing” (2022) depicts the artist’s late uncle, who worked as a coyote — someone paid to guide migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border. The painting belongs to Diaz’s “Coyote” series, which she began after his death, when the subject of his work — and the potential legal consequences of speaking about it — remained taboo within her family.
Guadalupe Maravilla’s “Pupusa Retablo” (2023) addresses migration through the intimate scale of devotion. Framed by found objects, the work takes the form of a retablo, a traditional devotional painting, and traces Maravilla’s journey from El Salvador to the United States in the 1980s. At eight years old, the artist traveled alone to the Texas border while fleeing the Salvadoran Civil War.
Taken together, the exhibition’s argument is less about defining a canon than about widening the frame: painting as a site where inherited genres can be retooled, where craft and folk traditions can sit beside museum collection narratives, and where the lived experience of movement across borders becomes not an aside, but a central way of seeing.
