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 an intentional community in Rockland County and Washington Heights. 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 writing a dissertation 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 and an upcoming exhibition at the Watermill Arts Center (2026).
He holds a BA in Art History with high honors and minors in German and Medieval Studies from New York University.
He is the consulting scholar and curator for the 2025-2027 Archive in Residence at Soft Network of the Archive of Sheyla Baykal and most recently organized, with Penny Arcade, the exhibition dearly Loved friends: Photographs by Sheyla Baykal, 1965-1990 (April 4 - May 10, 2025). He has been actively collaborating with Arcade and Steve Zehentner since 2022.
He was the editor and writer of Newspaper, published by Primary Information in March 2023. The book was 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 Puerto Rican painter René Santos (1954-1986), the architect Paul F. Williams (1925-1993), 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:
Smithsonian American Art Museum Fellows Lecture on Alfred Leslie
John Heneghan’s Old Time Radio Show (with Jerron Paxton and Will Stana)
Conversation with Philip Aarons about Newspaper