View of Gabriela Salazar's mixed-medium installation, 2013. Courtesy El Museo.
El Museo’s seventh biennial gathers 37 emerging Latino and Latin-American artists in a lively and smart show at the top of Museum Mile. Highlights include Gabriela Salazar’s found-object sculptures, which put you in mind of artists from Joseph Beuys to Carol Bove; Eric Ramos Guerrero’s pirate radio station, represented in an installation sardonically named Cortez Killer Cutz Radio (2011-ongoing); and self-taught young Cuban artist Bernardo Navarro Tomás’s strongly graphic paintings of Fidel Castro. As you’re standing in front of Mexican artist Giandomenico Tonatiuh Pellizzi’s life-size plywood replica of a once-slashed Barnett Newman painting, you’ll be hearing the soundtrack of another study in vulnerability: Élan Jurado’s unsettling video in which he chokes himself with paint and has himself shot with paintballs.