The most important Latin story at New York Art Week isn’t at the most prestigious fair. It’s at NADA — the nonprofit New Art Dealers Alliance fair, now in its 12th edition — where the galleries taking the biggest creative risks tend to show up.
And this year, the most compelling Latin presence comes from EMBAJADA, a gallery that has spent a decade doing exactly what its name says: acting as an embassy for Puerto Rican art on the world stage. (Kíko: “Embajada” means embassy. Adál Maldonado gave me a passport from El Puerto Rican Embassy. Miss you man.)
EMBAJADA: San Juan’s Embassy in New York
EMBAJADA opened in San Juan in 2015 with the explicit mission of functioning as an “embassy,” providing international visibility for Puerto Rican art. Founded by Christopher Rivera and Manuela Paz, who were living and working in New York at the time, the gallery has since served as a key bridge between the island’s art scene and the U.S. and broader international art world. @embajadada 🇵🇷
EMBAJADA was the first to showcase Daniel Lind-Ramos’s work, well before his acclaimed exhibition at MoMA PS1 brought him broader institutional recognition. In 2022, the gallery moved into a new permanent space in San Juan’s Hato Rey district — a historic house the founders were able to purchase just ahead of the post-pandemic surge in real estate prices. Gringos have bought up the island. Where are Puerto Ricans supposed to live?
At NADA New York 2026, EMBAJADA presents a two-person booth featuring Jonathan Torres (San Juan, Puerto Rico) and Georgina Treviño (Tijuana, Mexico / San Diego).
Jonathan Torres 🇵🇷
Jonathan Torres (born 1983, San Juan, Puerto Rico) received his BFA from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in San Juan and his MFA from Brooklyn College in 2012 under the mentorship of Vito Acconci.
His work explores memory, melancholy, and decay through fictional narratives — painting abandoned buildings across Puerto Rico as sites of altars or cemeteries for discarded teddy bears. His canvases carry the weight of places forgotten by history, communities pushed to the edges. Torres splits his time between his Brooklyn studio and Santurce, Puerto Rico, keeping one foot in the New York art world and one rooted in the island.
If you know Puerto Rico, you know there are a lot of abandoned buildings. The island has had an almost 14% population decline from 2000 to 2020, especially after Hurricane Maria put it into the Stone Age overnight. So many people have left, but all those abandoned places were once filled with hopes and dreams. Even through all that, Puerto Rican culture is one that dominates global youth culture through salsa, reggaeton, Latin trap, and now urban Latin.
Torres’ work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Museo Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico.
Writing about Puerto Rico always makes me want to go home.
Georgina Treviño 🇲🇽
Georgina Treviño is a contemporary artist and jeweler from Tijuana, Mexico, based in San Diego. Her practice combines art jewelry and sculptural traditions with the vernacular material culture, architecture, and norteño music of the Mexico-United States border.
She occupies a radical peripheral space — both in regional perspective and artistic discipline — deftly traversing cast-silver jewelry, tableware, custom wearables for celebrities, and industrially scaled sculpture. Her work transforms everyday scenes of the borderlands — hand-painted signs of joyerías, chewing gum covering the border wall, glinting pennies at the bottom of plaza fountains — into jewelry-inflected works of art.
Her work has been worn by Beyoncé, Bad Bunny, Rosalía, Karol G, and Kali Uchis. It is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and the Racine Art Museum.
NADA New York 2026
NADA New York 2026 brings together 120 galleries, art spaces, and nonprofit organizations spanning 15 countries and 46 cities — from Tbilisi and Tokyo to Mexico City and Philadelphia — with 53 first-time exhibitors.
Also present: Piedras (Buenos Aires, Argentina 🇦🇷) and Third Born (Mexico City, Mexico 🇲🇽), both with strong Latin American perspectives. Piedras means stones in Spanish. Buenos Aires has iconic stone streets.
Get Tickets
NADA New York 2026 🇦🇷 🇲🇽 🇵🇷
Emerging contemporary art fair
Argentine, Mexican, and Puerto Rican art
Starrett-Lehigh Building, Chelsea
Wed-Sun, May 13-17
$55+
By the way, the Starrett-Lehigh Building is a 1930 masterpiece of commercial architecture. The old freight terminal is an entire city block. It has elevators that can lift semi trucks. Many artists work there for the large spaces with good light. It’s another reason to visit NADA.