The Harn Museum of Art hosted a variety of Latin American student and community organizations Sept. 12 as part of its Museum Nights event to kick off Hispanic Heritage Month.
The event included the first night of the Latina Women’s League’s 20th annual Latino Film Festival, as well as museum-organized crafts and collaborative artworks. University organizations like the Center for Latin American Studies and the Hispanic Student Association tabled at the event, inviting guests to learn more about their programs.
“It brings visibility to the Harn, but then it also brings visibility to the Latin American heritage [through] art, activities, culture,” said Tami Wroath, 49, director of public relations and marketing for the Harn.
As part of its ongoing effort to draw more students to the museum, the Harn works with a team of UF students called the Museum University Student Educators, who meet weekly to discuss and plan upcoming events and how to promote them to other students.
The MUSEs coordinated the activities held at this Art After Dark event, drawing inspiration from artistic traditions of Central and South America, as well as works by Latin American artists currently in the museum’s collection.
These activities included making paper flowers, based on the Mexican tradition of decorating churches with paper flowers during the winter, as well as contributing to a collaborative mural, based on the work La Ofrenda by Miguel Arzabe. The museum allowed visitors to add to three different canvases, each with its own theme: food, music, and identity and culture.
“We invited participants to come up and write their response to our prompts about the three topics, just asking what they love, what's special to them, what ties them to their culture, and then they got to weave it into our canvases and create our own community,” said Brianna Lapwing, a UF business administration senior and a MUSE at The Harn.
Errol Nelson, a 31-year-old student engagement manager for the Harn, works with the MUSEs to promote outreach to both UF students and the broader Gainesville community. He and the MUSE team met on Wednesdays and worked together to contact the groups that were featured at the event, including Gator Salsa and the Center for Latin American Studies.
“We brainstorm, we come together, we sort of create a community inside, so that we can build community on the outside with events like this,” Nelson said.
For Abigail Reyes, a UF biological sciences freshman, moving from Miami to Gainesville for college led her to seek out that community at events like these.
“I feel like, especially here in Gainesville, there's not a lot of Hispanic representation,” Reyes said. “I see a lot of Asian and white representation, but I didn't really see any Hispanic representation. So it was nice to come and see some part of where we're from.”
The Hispanic population in Gainesville continues to grow, with the city’s number of Hispanic residents rising from nearly 13,000 people a decade ago to over 17,000 now. As the community expands, the Latina Women’s League has seen more interest in its annual Latino Film Festival, which it has hosted for 20 years.
Ericka Ghersi, president of the Latina Women’s League since 2021, made it a goal to return the film festival to a three-week format again this year for the first time since the pandemic. She and the League have worked to curate a wide variety of films to be shown throughout the three weeks, including more screenings for children and teenagers.
“I believe that we have to open our doors and be very receptive to the conversations that we usually have after the film with young people,” Ghersi said. “I believe that they have a lot of things to say [about] what is happening nowadays, and usually they can't talk about it in some places like school or at home.”
The Latina Women’s League showed “This Stolen Country of Mine,” a documentary about China’s hold on Ecuadorian oil and mining industries, followed by a question-and-answer discussion with Assistant Director Carlos Andres Vera.
“There are 250 chairs there, and 250 chairs are filled,” Ghersi said about the theater.
She hopes to bring the same visibility to Latin American visual artists, whose work will be displayed in a gallery at Santa Fe College Blount Center on Sept. 14 at 6 p.m.
Gator Salsa, another organization featured at the Art After Dark event, was similarly enthusiastic about the number of people who participated in the salsa and bachata dance classes it hosted.
“The majority of people are level one, like people that never danced before and don't even know what they're doing, like left or right foot, we’re here for those people,” said Ashley Barrios, a health science senior and vice president of Gator Salsa. “So we don't want anyone to be intimidated by that.”
Barrios helped lead Gator Salsa’s weekly dance classes downtown every Thursday night and assisted with the salsa and bachata lessons at the museum. She thinks of the club as a great way to meet new people by working towards “a common goal of learning a new move.”
While the Harn Museum focused strongly on promoting this Hispanic Heritage Month kick-off event to UF students, 35-year-old Jorgelina Benitez, who is a master's student in Latin American studies and was at the event tabling for the Center of Latin American Studies, wondered if events like this reach members of the community beyond UF students.
“I can tell most of the people that are here, they have some involvement [with] the university,” Benitez said. “I don't know if people outside of the university academic environment have access or interest in this kind of event, and I don't know how the city encourages the community to participate.”
For Eric Segal, 60-year-old director of education at the Harn, expanding the visibility of the museum to Gainesville residents is a major goal. He believes that a big part of this mission is deconstructing how we think of museums.
“I want people to feel like the museum is theirs and relevant to them,” Segal said. “You might think that a museum is for wealthy, privileged, white people, but really, this place is for anyone, whatever their background.”
Contact Juliana DeFilippo at jdefillipo@alligator.org. Follow her on X @JulianaDeF58101.
Juliana DeFilippo is a freshman journalism major and General Assignment reporter for The Avenue. In her free time, she loves to read and work on crossword puzzles.
