JURORS
ANDREW WALKER
Andrew Walker is the Executive Director at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. Since his arrival in 2011, he has led the initiative to expand the museum’s impact, both as a research center and as a community destination. Under his leadership the museum has also undergone a major renovation and programmatic transformation. Prior to his tenure at the Carter, he served as the Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of American Art at the Saint Louis Art Museum, where he oversaw a team of twelve curators and developed major exhibitions on African American artists in the collection, George Caleb Bingham and Joe Jones. He received his PhD in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania and serves as the Chairman of the Board of the World Chess Hall of Fame in Saint Louis, Missouri.
CRUZ ORTIZ
Cruz Ortiz is an American contemporary artist who uses multiple mediums to examine connections to nature, hope, healing, beauty, endurance, and the cosmos. Ortiz uses bold graphic screen prints, figurative abstract portraiture, dream-like landscape paintings, temporal guerrilla installations, utilitarian machines, hand-carved wooden sculptures, large-scale public art, video, and performance art. He is interested in the exhausting narratives searching for love and a sense of homeland. Currently, Ortiz has been exclusively working on painting as a romantic art historical form of documentation. It is by this archaic form that he is taking risks of institutionalizing subject matter. In a time where everything is digitalized and virtual, Ortiz is mixing oil paintings and painting from direct observation, while detecting the importance of painting for the future. He is also very interested in how painting pushes the critical contextualization of sociopolitical issues. His artistic projects aim to center the periphery to capture moments in history, especially the settler state that has tried, over and over, to erase from collective memory. With a great sense of urgency to record, preserve, and disseminate, he paints.
LESLIE MOODY CASTRO
Leslie Moody Castro is an independent curator and writer whose practice is based on itinerancy and collaboration. She has produced, organized, and collaborated on projects in Mexico and the United States for nearly two decades. She is committed to creating moments of exchange and dialogue within exhibitions, is a co-founder of Unlisted Projects Residency, and Co-Lab Projects, and in 2022 served as inaugural curatorial fellow and curator in residence at New Mexico State University and Casa Otro Residency, respectively. She has been awarded two grants from the National Endowment of the Arts for her curatorial projects and a fellowship from the Department of State for her research on borders. Moody Castro has participated in numerous residencies including the Narva Artist Residency, Estonia, The Galveston Artist Residency, Casa Lü Residency, Tepoztlán, MARSO CDMX, and Fountainhead, Miami. She has curated biennials including the Amarillo Museum of Art Biennial in 2021, The Texas Biennial in 2018, and co-curator of the Aurora Biennial in 2024. Moody Castro was guest editor of Glasstire Magazine from 2021—2024, is the founder of AtravesArte, and believes Mariachi makes everything better.