The Buffalo AKG Art Museum has opened "Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way," the first major institutional survey of contemporary Latinx painting in the United States. Curated by Andrea Alvarez, the exhibition features 58 living artists in an intergenerational dialogue, spanning an entire museum floor with seven thematic groupings. Alvarez conducted extensive studio visits across the U.S. and Puerto Rico over an unusually long research period, focusing solely on painting to establish a clear curatorial lens while reflecting the diversity of the Latino diaspora.
This exhibition matters because it fills a significant gap in American art history, offering the first comprehensive institutional acknowledgment of Latinx painters' contributions to contemporary art. By naming and framing this diverse community, the show challenges the art world to recognize a population that represents nearly one in five Americans yet has been largely absent from major museum surveys. The exhibition also engages with complex questions of identity, language, and terminology, using "Latinx" as a framework to open conversations about representation, market presence, and cultural self-identification.