The Brooklyn Rail

Curated by Veronica Melendez, Connected Diaspora: US Central American Visuality in the Age of Social Media is a celebration of multimedia artistic contributions of US Central American artists who too often are excluded from contemporary art world conversations. From site-specific installations, to prints, photography, ceramics, comics, video, and more, Connected Diaspora commands and takes up space at the Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery at Bennington College in Vermont. Previously exhibited at the Fredric Jameson Gallery at Duke University and at the Stamp Gallery at the University of Maryland in 2020, this third iteration of Connected Diaspora features artists from the previous shows as well as new additions. The exhibition at Usdan Gallery is the largest and most robust version, and continues to expand and interrogate what Central American art can be.

With the purpose of casting light on the contributions of a new generation of US Central American artists, the exhibition explores themes of displacement, war, and trauma, while also delving into conversations of nature, community, and everyday life. It features artistic interrogations to historical memory and the archive, while bringing light to root causes of migration and displacement. Threads connecting memory, family, home, queer love, and placemaking also wend their way throughout the show.

Although the first version of the exhibition took place in 2020, La Horchata Zine, launched in 2017, was its initial catalyst. La Horchata Zine, now renowned in the US Central American artistic community, was co-founded by Melendez and Kimberly Benavides (one of the artists featured in the show) as a response to the invisibility of Central American art within the United States art world and as a testament to the creative force of these artists and their expansive community. Usdan Gallery commissioned a reprint of all volumes of La Horchata Zine, and are all featured in the show. Although not every artist on view has appeared in the publication, Melendez credits the zine as well as the space of social media as facilitators for the connections forged among Central American artists.

As soon as we enter the galleries, we are rooted in a homecoming. Belizean artist Divine Bradley’s site-specific installation The Living Room (2023) transports us into a recreation of the artist’s family living room. Acting as a portal, Bradley’s installation generates a multi-sensorial experience that recovers his family’s own archives via video projections on old box televisions, while playing Belizean music. This installation demands to be seen and heard, and foregrounds some of the connecting threads of home, memory, and family that are present throughout the show.

Melendez's intention was not only to showcase the artistic contributions of contemporary Central American artists, but also honor the generations that came before them and center intergenerational healing. Panamanian artist Nicoletta Darita de la Brown’s giclée prints from the series “Bodega Body” (2023) affirms and honors Black women, while focusing on their rest and care. In the print titled Abuelita’s Kitchen, Brown credits her grandmother with learning how to love and heal in the kitchen. Anchoring the gallery, Kiara Aileen Machado’s large-scale, mixed media painting, Tres Generaciones (2023), features three generations of women in her family. The figures act as witnesses to the multiple generations of Central American artists present in the space. Just as family is a central pillar to the exhibition, so are explorations of how family dynamics alter through displacement and migration. Salvadoran-American artist Benavides uses excerpts from letters exchanged between family members separated across borders to title her photographs, honoring the longing for reunion.

The exhibition explores the creative ways Central American artists are forging interventions to different media while addressing often complex and violent histories. Guatemalan-American artist, Eddy Leonel Aldana’s “Untitled (El Pueblo No Se Olvida 01-06)” (2023) is a series of anthotype prints made on banana leaves featuring the images of Guatemalan politicians. Some prints highlight activists such as President Jacobo Árbenz who advocated for agrarian reforms to benefit Guatemalan people but was ousted in a US led military coup in 1954. Aldana also includes Efraín Ríos Montt in this series as a form of historical accountability. Under Montt’s tenure as President of Guatemala during the 1980s, he directed the genocide of thousands of Indigenous people in Guatemala and the dispossession of their land.

Guatemalan-American artist Jenica Heintzelman’s site specific installation, Masa de Mamá (2023) speaks to the nuanced and layered histories experienced and embodied by the diaspora. Almost resembling an altar of banana leaves against a backdrop of bright yellow cloth draped onto two hanging racks, Heintzelman’s installation explores the legacy of exploitative practices and land dispossession carried out by the United Fruit Company. Included in this installation are two still life photograph collages: one is made of volcano cutouts and the other is a banana collage. Expanding on the conversations around environmental and land stewardship, as well as cultural preservation Garifuna artist Isidra Sabio’s painting Activistas Culturales y Ambientales, features a group of Garifuna activists each standing tall and gazing directly at the viewer, demanding to be heard. Sabio’s painting captures the vital role of Black Garifuna activists, in particular women as protectors of land and the environment in Latin America.

Other artists featured in the show include Salvadoran artist Johanna Toruño, whose posters from “The Unapologetic Street” series celebrate Black and Brown queer pride whereas Guatemalan-American artist Carolina Porras Monroy’s six-foot long crochet piece, Querida (2021) plays homage to Juan Gabriel’s 1984 song and acts as a love letter to her family. Julia Mata’s comics, El Rio (2023) connects Salvadoran waterways to queerness, while affirming and reclaiming queer ancestors. Maya Ch’ort’i and Cuban artist Paulino Mejia’s clay sculptures Xochipilli (2016), Chalchiutlicue (2017) and Bacab 1+2 (2023) build upon the cycles of Maya creation and history.

To define the Central American diaspora and art would be a daunting task. Melendez’s curatorial decisions seek not to explain, but to expand, interrogate, and affirm the richness of work by these artists who are connected through their Central American experience. That the exhibition is now in its third iteration is a testament to the growing community of Central American artists and their ever-expanding embrace of different media and artistic practices. As a Salvadoran immigrant myself navigating through the long-held exclusionary establishment of the art world, this exhibition is an affirmation of our lived experience. Refusing the narrative of the monolith, Connected Diaspora speaks to the possibilities of self-representation, as well as to the possibility of what connection, community, and placemaking is and can mean for a diaspora, whose many members are here as result of displacement. As an exhibition, Connected Diaspora is a celebration rooted in the present moment of Central American visuality with nods to its past, and also a portal into the future as Central American artists delve into themes of intergenerational healing. We are invited to imagine a world that grounds and centers care, joy, community connections, and collective healing.