Neo-Latino Manifesto

A BRIEF HISTORY of NEO-LATINO ART and AESTHETICS:

The 21st Century Emergence of Neo-Latinoism:

One of the first art and aesthetic movements to emerge in the 21st Century has been Northern New Jersey’s Neo-Latino art movement. This coterie materialized during Newark’s Hispanic Heritage celebration at NJPAC, October, 2003; an exhibition that was co-curated by Olga Cruz (the Puerto-Rican American printmaker, who is leader of the Neo-Latino movement) and the Honorable Jeannette Ramos (Deputy Mayor of the City of Newark). The show included Josephine Barreiro, Hugo X. Bastidas, Hugo W. Morales, Alvin Quiñones, José Rodeiro, Miriam Santiago, Sergio Villamizar and Olga Cruz. The visual strength of this initial show led Claudia Rivera (a cultural official of SALUD, the Latino medical association at UMDNJ) to organize a November 2003 exhibition at the Robert Wood Johnson Gallery, University of Medicine and Dentistry (UMDNJ), Piscataway, NJ. Olga Cruz selected Dr. José Rodeiro (the Cuban-American painter and Coordinator of Art History, New Jersey City University) as curator for this UMDNJ show. Rodeiro asked Cruz for permission to increase the size of the Neo-Latino group, adding Olga Mercedes Bautista, Geraldo Castro, Leandro Flaherty, Rainiel Guzman, Jason Rivera, and Raúl Villarreal. Cruz concurred, and the current fourteen members were established. Two months after the UMDNJ show opened, Villarreal (the Cuban-American painter) named the movement “Neo-Latino,” during a mid-January, 2004 television interview on EB-TV’s “This Week in East Brunswick.”

This catalogue corresponds with fall’s 2004 Neo-Latino show entitled A New Diversity: Art from Northern New Jersey’s Latino Diaspora, in which Perth Amboy Gallery Center for the Arts, New Jersey City University, and Rutgers University collaborated to promote artistic transcultural awareness, by examining current visual artistic manifestations of African-Latina(o), Amerindian-Latina(o), Asian-Latina(o), and Caucasian-Latina(o) contemporary aesthetics and culture. This PAGCA show presents a cross-section of Hispanic art throughout northern New Jersey, acknowledging the historical significance of the Ibero-American Diaspora. In one way or another, all of these artists, or their parents, are immigrants or refugees from Latin America, or the descendants of Latin American immigrants or refugees, residing in other Spanish-speaking cultural regions throughout the Americas (e.g. South Florida, the Caribbean, the Southwest, Newark’s Ironbound Area, Union City (NJ), Dover (NJ), Perth Amboy (NJ), etc.).

The basic premise for the show is that 21st Century northern New Jersey’s Latino Diaspora does not confirm Hispanic cultural dispersion (as the word “Diaspora” implies), rather what is apparent is a unique cultural distention that is occurring throughout New Jersey’s greater metropolitan area(s), binding all Spanish-speaking cultural elements under a new rubric: “Neo-Latino” (or “Neo-Hispanic”) a term that acknowledges growing Latino(a) cultural unity, solidarity, and community in northern New Jersey. This northern New Jersey and New York City Latino phenomenon is filled with national implications for all Hispanics, implying a possible amalgamation of all North American Latino cultures, culminating in the inevitable Latinization of US-culture.

Bolivian poet and art theorist Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz has brilliantly defined the term Latino as ‘an enlightened Hispanic,’ characterizing a Latino as an Ibero-American person “enlightened” by greater cultural awareness. Owing to legal and illegal immigration, escalating birth rates, and obvious 21st century cultural developments, US-Latinization appears to be progressing.

Amid this endemic Latinization, a cluster of Northern New Jersey urban and suburban Latino(a) artists have banded together, under the leadership Olga Cruz to forge the first significant Hispanic art movement of the 21st Century, which is currently generating a new aesthetic that is based on the need for a rehumanization of art. Also, significant in their art are African, Amerindian, Asian, and Caucasian ethno-cultural, and visual artistic allusions, traditions and aspirations. These tendencies further induce Latino(a) cultural distention; while propagating a Neo-Latino aesthetic that expresses cross-racial, cross-ethnic and transcultural concerns.