Portrait by Louis Fratino in 2017 at Porsena, East Village
Marcelo Gabriel Yáñez (b. San Juan, PR 1996)
is an art historian, photographer, and archivist working between New York and Puerto Rico. He holds a Ph.D. in Art History from Stanford University. He works part-time as a lecturer in the Department of Art History at New York University and as an archival technician for the Archives of American Art in New York.
He is currently writing a book derived from his dissertation, The Disappearance of Landscape: Artists on Fire Island, 1937-1987. Part of the book chapter on Paul Thek in Oakleyville will be adapted into an exhibition at the Watermill Arts Center in 2026, organized with Noah Khoshbin.
He is the consulting scholar and curator for the 2025-2027 Archive in Residence at Soft Network of the Archive of Sheyla Baykal, where he mostly recently curated, with Penny Arcade, the exhibition dearly Loved friends: Photographs by Sheyla Baykal, 1965-1990.
He was a 2024-2025 Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellow at the Archives of American Art.
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 published and edited a revival of the publication as Newspaper Vol V between 2016 and 2017.
He was the research assistant for the Brooklyn Museum exhibition and publication Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines.
Before his Ph.D., he completed a BA in Art History with high honors and minors in German and Medieval Studies at New York University in 2018.
Other projects include on-going research and writing on the Puerto Rican painter René Santos (1954-1986), the architect and artist Paul F. Williams (1925-1993), as well as a discographical project about early recorded music in Cuba and Puerto Rico.
He welcomes inquiries about archival consulting, technician, brokering work, as well as art history teaching opportunities, in both the United States and Puerto Rico. He has held positions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Fales Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and as a contracted researcher and archivist for artists such as Penny Arcade, AA Bronson, Danny Fields, and institutions like the Smithsonian Archives of American Art (New York Office).
Email: mgabrielyanez@gmail.com
CV is available upon request.
some links:
Smithsonian American Art Museum Fellows Lecture on Alfred Leslie
Planetario on East Village Radio with DJ Tres Dos
John Heneghan’s Old Time Radio Show with Jerron Paxton and Will Stana
Conversation with Philip Aarons about Newspaper