In 2005 the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College and the Inter-University Program for Latino Research, University of Notre Dame, hosted their first national Conference on the Assessment and Valuation of Puerto Rican, Chicano, Latino and Hispanic-Caribbean Art. It was such a success that Centro and IUPLR this time joined by The Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA, The Americas Society, El Museo del Barrio, and El Taller Boricua, decided to do it again. Latino Art Now, a 3-day Conference consisting of seven panels and several collateral events took place at the Americas Society from January 1- February 2. Some forty Latino art historians, independent and museum directors, curators, artists and activists, presented papers ― many with slides ― that explored the vast contours of Latino Art both nationally and globally. Keynote speaker Carolina Ponce de León, Executive Director of Galería de la Raza, San Francisco opened the conference with a talk on ¿Encounters and Disencounters: A Personal Journey Through the Many Latin and US Latino Art World¿s.¿ In the evening participants attended the opening of El Museo Arte del Barrio¿s Arte ≠ Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000. The landmark exhibition surveyed, for the first time ever, through photographs, video, texts, ephemera, props, and artworks, the vast array of performative actions created over the last four decades by Caribbean, Latino and Latin American Artists. Here Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera performed her Lecture Series: 1 ― On Documentation (2004-005), and Raphael Montañez Ortiz, El Museo¿s founding director, using toy pianos, performed Yes, No, Maybe (2008), a variation of his historical piano destruction which he first presented at the 1966 Destruction In Art Symposium in London. Attendees also visited the Taller Boricua, a community arts organization, to see Creando Fuerza: Cambio y Permanencia, an exhibition of prints by Consejo Gráfico, an independent network of Latino print workshops and attended the opening of curator Yasmin Ramirez¿s, an Arts Fellow at Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, Esto A Veces Tiene Nombre: Latin@ Art Collectives in a Post Millennium, at New York University. Among the papers presented, Tracy Grimm, Archivist, Institute for Latino studies, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame tackled the preservation issue. ¿¿Historians build their foundations on pieces of paper,¿ Grimm said. ¿Locating primary sources ― artist¿s statements, catalogues, diaries, sketchbooks, letters, manifestos, photos, posters, grant files ― is our the first challenge, followed by preservation, and then the challenge of making materials accessible to scholars, students, teachers and the public.¿ Migration, Diaspora, and Exile were also hot topics. E. Carmen Ramos, Curator of Exhibitions, The Arts Council of Princeton, Princeton, New Jersey, discussed the Dominican Artistic Diaspora in the United States and what happens culturally when communities take root and sprout in new places. Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, Curator of the Jersey City Museum recounted her museum¿s retrospective of Raphael Montanez Ortiz and talked about Tropicalisms, Subversions of Paradise, an exhibition in which the tropical landscape became the vehicle for exploring how people from many different countries experienced this environment in similar ways. The most popular paper at the conference, also the most controversial, was delivered by Alejandro Anreus, Associate Professor of Art History and Latin American/ Latino Studies, William Patterson University, Wayne, New Jersey. He opened his presentation with a warning. ¿This is not going to be a traditional and dry art historical paper. Instead it is more of a mini-DADA intervention, inspired, no doubt by my heroes Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar and Ruben Blades, he stated. ¿There is no such thing as Latin American Art. There is art made ...