USLAF Names Josh T. Franco Executive Director as It Reworks Its Mission
The U.S. Latinx Art Forum is entering a new chapter with the appointment of artist, archivist, and curator Josh T. Franco as executive director. Franco, who took the role at the end of last year, succeeds founding director Adriana Zavala, the art historian and Tufts University professor who helped establish the organization in 2015. Mary Thomas, who was promoted at the same time, is now deputy director.
The leadership change comes as USLAF recalibrates how it wants to operate. Franco and Thomas have revised the group’s mission statement to emphasize not only scholarship and advocacy, but also the slower work of relationship-building. The new language describes USLAF as creating “an expansive and convivial space” and even centers the idea of “hanging out in this space.” In practice, that has already translated into intimate dinners in New York, San Juan, Chicago, and San Antonio, designed to connect artists, members, and potential supporters.
For Franco, the shift is not cosmetic. It reflects what USLAF has learned over the past decade about how communities form and how visibility is built. The organization emerged in 2015 after a panel at the College Art Association titled “Imagining a U.S. Latina/o Art History,” when scholars and artists were confronting a familiar problem: Latinx artists were still underrepresented in museums, exhibitions, and permanent collections.
Since then, USLAF has grown into a membership organization of roughly 600 people. It has published research based on data documenting that lack of representation, and it has developed programs intended to bring the field into closer contact with itself.
Its most consequential initiative has been the Latinx Artist Fellowship, which ran from 2021 to 2025 and awarded 75 artists $50,000 each. The program was supported by a $5 million grant from the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, and it also funded 75 scholarly essays collected under the banner “X as Intersection: Writing on Latinx Art.” The essays were organized around 10 themes, including “Unmasking Coloniality” and “Materiality of Memory.”
Franco said the fellowship has expanded the field’s visibility while also widening the circle of names that circulate within it. USLAF is now preparing an exhibition of all 75 fellows at Tufts University, with hopes of securing additional venues so the project can travel nationally and internationally. Franco also plans to establish the organization’s first board of directors, a step that could strengthen its long-term governance as it moves from a decade of formation into a more ambitious phase of public programming.
