Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is pleased to present Xican-A.O.X. body, opening June 13, 2024. Organized by the American Federation of Art and co-curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill with Marissa Del Toro and PAMM Chief Curator Gilbert Vicario, the exhibition includes over 150 works by 70 artists and collectives. Ranging in diverse media from painting, photography, works on paper, sculpture, and moving images, Xican-A.O.X. Body foregrounds the body as a site to explore political agency and imagination, artistic investigation, decolonization, and alternative forms of affectivity and community as linked to Chicano experiences. The exhibition serves as the first group exhibition to celebrate Xicanx artists working conceptually, experimentally, and or with a performative focus. The term, Xicanx, is inclusive of the Indigenous and colonized people of Mexican descent as well as the people who may originate from Central and South American nations.

“Xican-A.O.X. body contextualizes and celebrates an intergenerational community of artists whose lived experiences go as far back as the Civil Rights Movement. While Xicanx artists have long suffered from underrepresentation within the cultural and social fabric of contemporary American art, exhibitions such as Xican-A.O.X. body fundamentally contribute to larger national conversations about US Latino culture at this moment”, says PAMM Chief Curator Gilbert Vicario.

Xican-A.O.X. body features multidisciplinary works from the late 1960s to the present, convoluting the common understanding of Xicanx art and culture and highlighting the complex nature of varying visual practices. The exhibition emerges at the intersection of experimental artistic practices and the notion of the Brown body as articulated in the context of Xicanisma: —a vital and inclusive concept developed in the 1990s that calls for self-determination of ethnic, political, and cultural identities through greater acknowledgment of Indigenous roots, intersectional identities, and feminism. While the multiplicity inherent in this term is central to the project’s organizing concept, the exhibition proudly includes the work of artists who identify in myriad ways—including Mexican American, Chicana/o, Xicanx, Indigenous, Latinx, Black, and Brown.

Xican-A.O.X. body fits with the mission and vision of PAMM as the premiere venue for presenting the work of Latin American and American Latino artists in the country. We are excited and proud to present this important show by three experts of Latin American and Latino art, including our own Chief Curator, Gilbert Vicario”, said PAMM Director Franklin Sirmans.

The exhibition is organized into eight sections: Political pop, Brown commons, Networks, Nepantla, Radical violence, Resilience, Disrupting social space, and Disidentify and reimagine.

At the nucleus of the exhibition is Brown commons, which highlights artists who raise questions of belonging and feelings of invisibility; interrogating the stereotypes and role of race in relation to the Xicanx body and identity, while also highlighting the intrinsic beauty and soulful presence of Xicanx existence. Dis-identify and re-imagine embraces queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of “disidentification”—a process for which those outside the racial and sexual mainstream transform majority identity frameworks for their own purposes. This section includes artists offering points of cultural contradiction by displaying Brown, queer bodies as active agents in countering essentialist narratives, and as sites of social and political residence that challenge preconceived assumptions rooted in phobic logic of race, gender, and sexuality from within and outside Latinx communities.

Nepantla: growth and creativity, explores Nepantla; a concept articulated by the feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa as the symbolic space of in-betweenness, liminality, and transformation created in response to multiple forms of oppression and exclusion. Disrupting social space features work inspired by the protests and marches of the Civil Rights era in the United States, and the spiritual and conceptual relationship inspired by civil unrest and its visual inscription into cultural and societal imagination by individuals fighting for justice and equality. Generating pop / sharing vernacular highlights the post-war period, assemblage art, and Pop Art, with an eye towards Native American, African American, Asian American, and Latinx American artists, who were often omitted from the mainstream retellings of the history of these art forms. Nexus and Networks features a range of work that speaks on affectivity, affection, solidarity, and shared feelings of belonging within decolonized communities. In Radical violence, artists counter the glorification and banalization of violence into a form of spectacle with an exploration of how people of color have been targeted in the United States since colonial times. The Resilience/resistance section focuses on symbolic and often less explicit—though not less harmful than —forms of violence, such as racism, classism, marginalization, exploitation of labor, and structural inequality.

Xican-a.o.x. body is organized by the American Federation of Arts. Major support for the exhibition and catalog is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Generous support for the exhibition at PAMM is provided by Patricia and William Kleh.

Participating artists

Laura Aguilar, Celia Alvarez Muñoz, Asco (Harry Gamboa Jr., Glugio Gronk Nicandro, Willie Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez), Mario Ayala, Judith F. Baca, Julia Barbosa Landois, Ariana Brown, Nao Bustamante, William Camargo, Barbara Carrasco, Charlie Cartwright (Good Time Charlie), Mel Casas, Isabel Castro, Reina D. Cervántez, Enrique Chagoya, Artemisa Clark, Liz Cohen, Adriana Corral, Camilo Cruz, Cyclona, Ms. Vaginal Davis, Natalie Diaz with Mohammed Hammad, Alex Donis, Frances Salomé España, Rafa Esparza, Justin Favela, Christina Fernandez, Diane Gamboa, Maria Gaspar, Jay Lynn Gomez, Ken Gonzales-Day, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Fabian Guerrero, Eser Hernandez, Sebastian Hernandez, Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Salomón Huerta, Luis Jiménez, Alma López, Yolanda López, Richard A. Lou, Jamse Luna, Narsiso Martinez, Patrick Martinez, Delilah Montoya, Malaquias Montoya, Chuço Moreno, Gabriela Muñoz, Marcos Raya, Sandy Prodiguez, Gabriela Ruiz, Sylvia Salazar Simpson, Shizu Saldamando, Teddy Sandoval, Tamara Santibañez, The Q-Sides (Vero Majano, Amy Martinez, and Kari Orvik), Walter Thompson-Hernández, John Valadez, Patssi Valdez, Linda Vallejo, Ricardo Valverde, Kathy Vargas, José Villalobos.

About American Federation for the Arts

The American Federation of Arts is the leader in traveling exhibitions internationally. A nonprofit organization founded in 1909, the AFA is dedicated to enriching the public’s experience and understanding of the visual arts through organizing and touring art exhibitions for presentation in museums around the world, publishing exhibition catalogs featuring important scholarly research, and developing educational programs.

About The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

In accordance with Andy Warhol’s will, the mission of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts is the advancement of the visual arts. The Foundation manages an innovative and flexible grants program while also preserving Warhol’s legacy through creative and responsible licensing policies and extensive scholarly research for ongoing catalogue raisonné projects. To date, the Foundation has given nearly $300 million in cash grants to more than 1,000 arts organizations in 49 states and abroad and has donated 52,786 works of art to 322 institutions worldwide.

About The Terra Foundation for American Art

The Terra Foundation supports visual arts projects with a focus on art of the United States and Indigenous art of North America that question and broaden understandings of American art and transform how its stories are told. The foundation encourage projects that generate knowledge and interpretive frameworks that reflect the range and complexity of American art and its histories through the diversity of artists represented, voices included, and stories told; that center artists, scholars, and communities who have been systematically excluded from narratives, practices, and presentations of American art; and that commit to inclusive and equitable practices across project development and implementation in order to lead to structural change.