Yxta Maya Murray

Oct 31, 2024 | aperture.org | Yxta Maya Murray

Over the last decade, the Art Gallery of Ontario embarked on an initiative to incorporate twentieth-century photography detailing life in Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico into its collections. Beyond poetic images created by Graciela Iturbide and Manuel Álvarez Bravo, the Toronto museum also houses photographs of protests and coups.

Jun 5, 2024 | artillerymag.com | Tulsa Kinney |Yxta Maya Murray

What is a colorist painter?

Mar 29, 2024 | aperture.org | Yxta Maya Murray

As a high school student in Puerto Rico, around 2005, Christopher Gregory-Rivera grew active in student movements that fought university tuition hikes. His mother wasn’t happy about it. “She would say, ‘Cuidado, te van a carpetear,’ which meant that the police were going to open a file on me,” Gregory-Rivera told me recently. “That was my first exposure to the idea that the police were opening files, or carpetas, on dissidents.

Feb 16, 2024 | aperture.org | Yxta Maya Murray

Consider the origin stories of two famous photographs. In 1936, Dorothea Lange photographed a white woman displaced by the Dust Bowl who was staring into the distance. In the image, the woman’s two children cling to her but turn away from Lange’s camera so we see only their tousled hair. The photo’s protagonist—whom we now know to be Florence Owens Thompson—gingerly touches the corner of her mouth and looks as if she wants to disappear.

Feb 3, 2023 | aperture.org | Yxta Maya Murray

On June 16, 1966, Stokely Carmichael, who had just been elected head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), appeared at the Meredith March Against Fear in Greenwood, Mississippi. Carmichael, alongside leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer, had resolved to continue the weeks-long protest march begun by the voting-rights activist James Meredith, who, while on his solitary walk from Memphis to Jackson, had been shot by a white supremacist.