Smithsonian American Art Museum Names Marisa Lerer as the Marianna and Juan A. Sabater Adjunct Curator of Latinx Art 

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has appointed Marisa Lerer as the Marianna and Juan A. Sabater Adjunct Curator of Latinx Art. Lerer specializes in Latin American and Latinx art, public art and memorials. She will help shape the museum’s exhibition program and collecting priorities as they relate broadly to Latinx art, as well as a multiyear comprehensive reinstallation of its permanent collection galleries. She joins the museum’s curatorial department, which currently is composed of 14 curators and curatorial fellows, led by Randall Griffey, head curator. Lerer’s appointment began today.

“Since the late 1970s, the Smithsonian American Art Museum has demonstrated a deep commitment to building a rich collection of Latinx art in the nation’s capital,” Griffey said. “Marisa Lerer’s expertise in interpreting a wide range of Latinx art made her an especially appealing candidate for this opportunity given SAAM’s collection that spans from historical artworks to objects by contemporary artists.”

Lerer is the director of education at the Creative Capital Foundation. She previously held positions as chair and as associate professor of modern and contemporary art at Manhattan University. Lerer was a Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies Program Fellow, and, in 2023, she was the George Gurney Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She was a recent recipient of the Calvin B. Grimes Award at New York University, Surf Point Foundation Residency and a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for her current book project on Latinx public memorials. She has contributed articles and book reviews to the journal Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture and serves on the editorial board of Public Art Dialogue, a forum for critical discourse and commentary about the practice of public art.

Lerer earned a doctorate from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, a master’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles and a bachelor’s degree from New York University. Her dissertation is titled “30,000 Reasons to Remember: Patronage and Artistic Strategies for Memorializing Argentina’s Disappeared.”

This curatorial position is supported by private funds through a gift from Marianna and Juan A. Sabater. Juan Sabater is a member of the museum’s advisory board and is a champion for the museum’s Latinx art program. 

Latinx Art Collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum  

The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s leading Latinx art collection represents a commitment to building a great national collection reflecting the rich contributions of Latinos to the United States, from the colonial period to the present. Artists featured in the collection reflect the breadth of Latino communities in the U.S., including artists of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and Dominican descent, as well as other Latin American groups with deep roots in the United States. The museum began actively collecting Latinx art in 1979 beginning with Luis Jiménez’s “Man on Fire,” the first artwork by a Latinx artist to enter the permanent collection. Artworks range from colonial religious works and woven textiles to abstract expressionist paintings and contemporary installations.  

Notable artworks from the collection range from 18th-century colonial Puerto Rico works by José Campeche and The Caban Group to modern and contemporary artists such as ADÁL, Olga Albizu, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Melesio “Mel” Casas, Teresita Fernández, Carmen Herrera, Luis Jiménez, Yolanda López, Vik Muniz, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Freddy Rodríguez and Rafael Soriano. Influential graphic artists and collectives in the collection include Rupert García, Malaquias Montoya, Ester Hernandez, the Royal Chicano Air Force, David Avalos, Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, Sandra Fernández, Juan de Dios Mora, the Dominican York Proyecto Grafíca, Enrique Chagoya, René Castro, Juan Fuentes and Linda Lucero, among others.

The museum has organized groundbreaking exhibitions, including “¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now,” currently on a U.S. tour; “Radical Histories: Chicanx Prints from the Smithsonian American Art Museum” (on tour beginning in 2025); “Tamayo: The New York Years” (2017); and “Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art” (2013).