Portrait by Louis Fratino in 2017 at Porsena, East Village
Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez (b. San Juan, PR 1996)
is a photographer, art historian, and archivist living in New York between Upper Manhattan and an intentional community in Rockland County. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University and a 2024-2025 Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow at the Archives of American Art.
He is at work on a dissertation tentatively titled The Disappearance of Landscape: Artists on Fire Island, 1937-1983. Chapter focuses include the work of PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French), Alfred Leslie, Paul Thek, and Betty Beaumont. The dissertation exists alongside a long-term film project about Fire Island’s eventual submersion.
He holds a BA in Art History with high honors and minors in German and Medieval Studies from New York University.
He is the editor and writer of Newspaper, published by Primary Information in March 2023. The book is an expansion of his undergraduate honors thesis on the topic.
He was the research assistant for the Brooklyn Museum exhibition and publication Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines.
Other projects include on-going research and writing on the Turkish-American photographer Sheyla Baykal (1944-1997) and the Puerto Rican painter René Santos (1954-1986), as well as a personal discographical project about early recorded music in Cuba and Puerto Rico.
Emails: mgabrielyanez@gmail.com
mgyanez@stanford.edu
CV is available upon request
some links:
John Heneghan’s Old Time Radio Show (with Jerron Paxton and Will Stana)
Conversation with Philip Aarons about Newspaper