Visual Arts Professor and Alums Gather in a Flourishing Way at Buffalo AKG

Assistant Professor of Visual Arts David Antonio Cruz, Esteban Cabeza de Baca '14, and José Delgado Zúñiga '17 are among the fifty-eight artists gathered at Buffalo AKG Art Museum for Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way, an exploration of contemporary Latinx painters.

Titled after former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera's poem "Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way," the exhibition celebrates Latinx art that, like the diaspora, is infinitely diverse in its subject matter and formal innovations. 

Cruz, who also serves as Director of Graduate Studies and Concentration Head of Painting, applies methods of traditional portraiture to nontraditional subjects, celebrating queer histories and chosen families through lush, colorful brushstrokes. His painting, iknowyou’vebeenwonderingwherei’vebeen:adrift,adraft,astare,atilt,asigh,exhale.but,icamebacktoletyouknow,gotathingforyou,andican’tletitgo_the raft. (oil, acrylic, and ink on wood panel, 72" × 98 ½", 2024), gives equal attention to six colorfully clad individuals sprawled over and spilling off of one couch. 

With a looser hand, Cabeza de Baca gestures toward a version of landscape painting that encounters rather than captures an environment. In Waterfalls (acrylic on canvas, 4' x 7', 2025), three moons triangulate a landscape that is simultaneously a desert, an ocean, and a mountain range.

Zúñiga’s Pheonix (oil on linen, 100” x 77”, 2023) defies categorization, merging human and avian forms in a sort of intergalactic explosion of paint.

Through lush self-expression and culturally specific interventions, the artists included in the exhibition push the boundaries of disciplines as well as nations.

Curated by Curator Andrea Alvarez, the AKG exhibition will be followed by a national tour covering the Des Moines Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Phoenix Art Museum, and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle.

Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way is on view March 6–September 6, 2026 at Buffalo AKG Museum in Buffalo, NY.