As I stated earlier, Our America is organized fairly broadly and liberally along the lines of nine different themes: “Reframing the Past and Present,” “Migrating Through History,” “The Graphics Boom,” “Turning Point,” “Street Life,” “Signs of the Popular,” “Everyday People,” “We Interrupt This Message,” and finally “Defying Categories.” These themes are all listed as individual links on the exhibition homepage which features a short essay explaining the exhibition’s background and significance. Each of these exhibition themes features its own web page with a short paragraph of contextualizing copy followed by enlargeable thumbnail images of artworks with short captions offering the title, artist, and year of creation for each work. When one enlarges a particular piece, a larger caption that further explains the individual work becomes available. While the more general thematic paragraphs tend to be fairly weak in terms of providing any actual insights, they do serve to rationalize the separation of the works chosen into these particular categories. “Reframing the Past and Present” deals specifically with artist reactions to the Mexican-American and Spanish-American wars and reframing more traditional narratives about those wars (despite these reactions coming a century and a half century away from each of these wars respectively). “Migrating Through History” provides a set of works dealing with questions of incorporation into American citizenship post-annexation as a result of the previously mentioned wars. This particular set of works is also brought together insofar as each piece utilizes layering techniques or an aesthetic of complex layers as a metaphor for the complexity of layered identity post-annexation. “The Graphics Boom” presents a set of posters, postcards, and other graphics-based works of art that are from the civil rights period in the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements of the 1960s-1980s. “Turning Point” features works that use the civil rights period as a moment of reclaiming indigenous and African identities and presenting historical moments as a way of asserting a Latino identity. “Street Life” takes a look at the presence of Latin@ people in urban spaces, and these works often address the ways that power structures affect the Latin@ community within these spaces. “Signs of the Popular” shows the blend of US and Latin-American vernacular and pop culture elements, thereby expanding notions of American, art, and culture in the process. “Everyday People” concerns itself with portraiture as a political statement about the quotidian in US Latino life. As with pop culture, portraiture is used as a method for reimagining the notion of American within a Latino context. “We Interrupt This Message” collects work that critiques mass media and advertising, particularly in their use of stereotypes. Much of this work is also noted as pertaining to or being in conversation with Third World liberation movements of the 90s and new millennium. “Defying Categories” is a collection of avant-garde and abstract Latin@ works, and it discusses the relationship between broader artistic trends in the west and the way Latin@ artists either participated in or rejected those movements, including abstract and avant-garde movements.

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