Listing: Past

Voces y Visiones: Four Decades through El Museo’s Permanent Collection

As part of itsreopening on Saturday, October 17, 2009,El Museo del Barrio will unveil the Carmen Ana Unanue Galleries, the first space dedicated to the museum’s Permanent Collection, fulfilling one of the main objectives of its renovation campaign. The galleries will showcase, on a rotating basis, highlights from one of the oldest and most important collections of twentieth-century Caribbean, Latino, and Latin American art in the United States, along with related events and educational programs. The inaugural exhibition, Voces y Visiones: Four Decades Through El Museo’s Permanent Collection, made possible thanks to the generous support of American Express and the National Endowment of the Arts, will take viewers through a timeline of El Museo’s history in relation to the history of Latin American and Caribbean art in New York, the United States, and internationally.

The inaugural Voces y Visiones exhibition will include a rich and varied range of artworks and historical objects from the permanent collection ranging from Pre-Columbian Taíno works, to Santos and other devotional objects, prints and posters, and modern and contemporary art. Presented in three sections that will focus on milestones in the history of El Museo, Voces y Visiones encompasses more than 200 pieces of artwork documentation and memorabilia from a variety of mediums and cultures.

Juan Francisco Elso: Por América

Juan Francisco Elso: Por América investigates the brief yet significant career of the late Cuban artist Juan Francisco Elso (1956-1988). Based in Havana, Elso was part of the first generation of artists born and educated in post-revolutionary Cuba, who gained international recognition in the early 1980’s. Created mostly using natural, organic materials, his sculptural practice examines the complex forms of contemporary Cuban, Caribbean, and Latin American identities, as inflected by the cultural influences of Indigenous traditions, Afro-Caribbean religious beliefs, as well as the traumas of colonial oppression. Elso’s commitment to such histories – which relate to El Museo del Barrio’s own foundational ethos – presage current post- and decolonial perspectives. The exhibition examines such legacies and parallels by placing Elso’s prescient work alongside a multigenerational group of artists active in the Caribbean, and throughout North, South, and Central America.

Presented through a contextual rather than monographic approach, Juan Francisco Elso: Por América is organized into several, interrelated thematic sections that explore vital crosscurrents between Elso’s art and the creative output of both close colleagues and others who, despite having not known him, demonstrate parallel affinities. Featuring 45 works by more than 30 artists, the exhibition includes Belkis Ayón; José Bedia; Ricardo Brey; Tania Bruguera; María Magdalena Campos-Pons; Luis Camnitzer; Los Carpinteros (Alexandre Arrechea, Marco Castillo, and Dagoberto Rodriguez); Albert Chong; Papo Colo (Francisco Colón Quintero); Jimmie Durham; Melvin Edwards; Scherezade García; Silvia Gruner; Karlo Andrei Ibarra; Graciela Iturbide; Magali Lara; Kcho (Alexis Leyva Machado); Glenn Ligon; Rogelio López Marin (GORY); Ana Mendieta; Senga Nengudi; Lorraine O’Grady; Gabriel Orozco; Marta María Pérez Bravo; Gustavo Pérez-Monzón; Ángel Ramírez; Michael Richards; Alison Saar; Leandro Soto; Renée Stout; Gerardo Suter; and Ruben Torres Llorca, as well as new commissions by Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Reynier Leyva Novo.

Following its presentation at El Museo del Barrio, Juan Francisco Elso: Por América will travel to Phoenix Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. The show is accompanied by a publication, co-published by El Museo del Barrio, which will offer the first comprehensive bilingual study dedicated to the artist (available spring 2023).

Juan Francisco Elso: Por América is made possible thanks to major support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support provided by Tony Bechara; Ella Fontanals-Cisneros; Celso Gonzalez-Falla; Elizabeth Redleaf; Craig Robins; Steven and Judy Shank, John Thomson, and The Debra and Dennis Scholl Fund at The Miami Foundation. Commissions are made possible by VIA Art Fund and the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. Publication support by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund. Supported in part with public funds from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the NYC Council.

Reynier Leyva Novo: Methuselah

El Museo del Barrio is pleased to present Reynier Leyva Novo: Methuselah. Conceived by the Cuban-born and Houston based artist Reynier Leyva Novo, the digital artwork virtually reproduces the 6000-mile transnational migratory journey of a single monarch butterfly, tracking its travel from southern Canada across the United States to Mexico. Embodied through the life of a virtual avatar, the epic journey is hosted and reproduced in real time on a specially designed, open-access, dedicated website. Commissioned by El Museo del Barrio with the support of VIA Art Fund, the in-person mixed-reality presentation at El Museo debuts in conjunction with the upcoming Fall exhibition, Juan Francisco Elso: Por América.

Methuselah debuted to the public on September 22, 2022, coinciding with the Fall equinox and the start of the monarch’s migration. Viewers can follow the virtual avatar 24 hours a day via a website, observing as the specimen makes its way south across changing terrain, weather patterns, and other variable physical conditions.

To see the journey live, visit www.methuselahmonarch.com. For mobile viewing, download the free Apple IPhone app, here.

ABOUT METHUSELAH

Working with butterfly experts, taxidermists, animators, computer modelers, and software designers for over a year, artist Novo translated the monarch butterfly from an analog specimen into a digital animation. Accessible online, the virtual avatar can be observed 24 hours a day during a one-year cycle as it flutters, flies, feeds, and rests with the ease and delicacy of a real insect. At any given time, the software program determines the butterfly’s movements in space, drawing upon numerous data points related to monarch migration patterns. No single observed motion is the same. This presentation offers viewers a privileged and unprecedented look at a day in the life of a single monarch butterfly, a phenomenon that until recently was impossible to observe or track.

The title of the work, Methuselah, refers to the fourth generation of monarchs in each annual cycle. Weighing less than one gram each, and living only two-to-six weeks, monarch butterflies take four generations of offspring to complete their annual migration. Born furthest North, the Methuselah generation lives longer than the other travelers born further south. With this extended life span, it is able to complete the epic transcontinental migration each year, allowing for its species’ survival.

In tracing the monarch’s flight across the Americas, Methuselah addresses larger contemporary issues related to migration, climate change, and the necessity of transnational cooperation, as expressed in the life of a singular specimen. Calling attention to the false security of borders, the artwork offers a critical metaphor for twenty-first-century existence, made all the more poignant by the monarch’s recent categorization as an endangered species.

ABOUT REYNIER LEYVA NOVO

Reynier Leyva Novo (b. 1983, Havana, Cuba, and based in Houston, Texas) is one of Cuba’s leading conceptual artists. Novo’s practice challenges ideology and symbols of power, challenging notions of an individual’s ability to affect change. His multidisciplinary practice includes mining historical data and official documents, the content of which he transforms into formally minimalist and conceptually charged sculptures and multimedia installations. Novo’s artwork has been presented at the Liverpool Biennial (2010), Venice Biennale (2011, 2017), Havana Biennial (2015, 2019), Shanghai Biennale (2018), Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti (2019), Aichi Triennial (2019), among others. His art is collected by international museums and arts institutions such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Bronx Museum of Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Museo de Bellas Artes de Habana; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others.

Reynier Leyva Novo: Methuselah is commissioned by El Museo del Barrio through the generous support of VIA Art Fund. The project is presented in relation to El Museo del Barrio’s Fall 2022 exhibitions are possible thanks to major support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; Tony Bechara; Ella Fontanals-Cisneros; Celso Gonzalez-Falla; Elizabeth Redleaf; Craig Robins; Steven and Judy Shank, and John Thomson. Commissions are made possible by VIA Art Fund and the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. Supported in part with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the New York City Council.

DOMESTICANX

DOMESTICANX brings together seven intergenerational artists whose practices address the private sphere through works related to healing, spirituality, decoration, and the home. The show is inspired by the concept of “domesticana,” first theorized by artist, scholar, and critic Amalia Mesa-Bains in the 1990s. Proposed as a Chicana feminist response to the male-dominated “rasquachismo,” domesticana shifts the defiant and expressive inventiveness of rasquache culture to the specific experience of working-class women. Drawing from Mesa-Bains’s own acknowledgement that all “terminologies must remain porous, sensibilities never completely named, and categories shattered,” DOMESTICANX expands the artists’s original Chicana and feminist theory through the sense of contemporary Latinx intersectionality.

The show encompasses paintings, textiles, ceramics, and installation – including a reconceived artwork by Mesa-Bains, first presented at El Museo del Barrio in 1995 – and features works by veteran artists Mesa-Bains, Nitza Tufiño and Maria Brito, alongside the first museum presentations by emerging artists Amarise Carreras, Cielo Félix-Hernández, Joel Gaitan, and Misla. Representing different backgrounds, genders, and generations, the seven artists presented in DOMESTICANX reflect sustained and continuing responses to Mesa-Bains’ exhortation to “undo the wounds of patriarchy and colonization.”

DOMESTICANX is supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, as well as with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the New York City Council.

Raphael Montañez Ortiz — A Contextual Retrospective

El Museo del Barrio is pleased to present Raphael Montañez Ortiz: A Contextual Retrospective, the first large-scale exhibitionsince 1988 dedicated to the artist, activist, educator, and founder of El Museo del Barrio. Curated by El Museo’s chief curator, Rodrigo Moura, and guest curator Julieta González, the exhibition spans several decades of his production, from the 1950s to the early-2020s, in different media such as film, painting, photography, video installations, documents, and assemblages. This is the largest exhibition-to-date dedicated to the artist.

Raphael Montañez Ortiz is a central figure in U.S. Post-war art, whose pioneering practice began with trail-blazing experimental film works in 1957. In the 1960s, he was a key figure in the international Destruction Art movement, with performative actions that would result in powerful sculptures made from destroyed objects. His practice expands art historical references, from U.S. Abstract Expressionism and Dada to identity and his upbringing in a Puerto Rican family in New York. At the same time, his work was informed by an ongoing interest in psychoanalysis and anthropology, which resulted in his exploration of shamanic practices and the therapeutic and healing potential of art, parallel to his research into pre-Hispanic cultures. This is a constant concern that runs from the early destruction pieces such as the Archaeological Finds to his later performative actions and works addressing the Indigenous cultures of the Americas.

The exhibition is divided into four sections exploring the contributions of Montañez Ortiz to art of the 20th and 21st Centuries. These include Destruction, which focuses on his early films and assemblages and a large group of Archaeological Finds, with works from different American and European Museum collections seen together for the first time; Decolonization and Guerrilla Tactics, which addresses his Puerto Rican background and related activism, including his participation in the foundation of El Museo del Barrio and his engagement with other groups at the time, such as the Art Workers Coalition, the Guerrilla Art Action Group, the Taller Boricua, and the Judson Gallery; Ethnoaesthetics, referring to a term coined by him and dealing with forms of resistance to cultural ethnocentrism; and Physio-Psycho-Alchemy, which explores the core concept of his doctoral thesis and the works he made in this direction, where meditation, ritual, and breathing practices are at the center of a series of performative and participative works. In addition, the section presents his videos produced in the 1980s, where cutting and editing are employed to produce almost hypnotic effects.

Raphael Montañez Ortiz: A Contextual Retrospective is presented by Bank of America. Leadership support is provided by Tony Bechara. Major support is provided by the Terra Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Additional support is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA).

Popular Painters and Other Visionaries

Popular Painters and Other Visionaries examines the practices of 35 artists working on the margins of modernism and the mainstream art world throughout the Americas around the mid-20th century. The exhibition creates new dialogues between Latino and Latin American artists, with an emphasis on the US, the Caribbean, and South America and the African diaspora in these regions. The term “popular” painters is used to identify artists that because of their class or racial backgrounds have been marginalized from official art history and labeled with pejorative terms such as naive and primitive.

First presented as a virtual exhibition during the months of the global pandemic, this new version of the show presented in the galleries will feature over 100 works, with more than half drawn from El Museo’s Permanent Collection. The checklist is supplemented with loans from other institutional collections, including The Museum of Modern Art and the American Folk Art Museum and Museu de Arte de São Paulo, as well as works from private holdings never presented before in New York.

The exhibition is grouped in four thematic sections. “Inside/Outside” explores the hybrid influence of European genre painting and popular culture in the work of Black Modernists such as Horace Pippin, Heitor dos Prazeres, and Micius Stéphane, among others. “Visible/Invisible” focus on the influence of spirituality and Afro-Atlantic religions, including paintings by Benoît Rigaud and Louisiane Saint Fleurant, works on paper by Minnie Evans and Consuelo González Amézcua, sculptures by Chico Tabibuia, and beadwork by Antoine Oleyant. “Public/Private” showcases the interest for vernacular architecture and the representation of communal landscapes, including a large group of serigraphs by Manuel Hernández Acevedo and in-depth presentations by Préfète Duffaut and Asilia Guillén. “Animal/Human” presents a mix of human and animal figurative works, focusing on Latinx pioneers such as Felipe Jesús Consalvos, Gregorio Marzán, and Eloy Blanco.

An accompanying scholarly, 200-page catalog will be published, including essays by the curators, reproduction of works in the exhibition, and commissioned close-reading short-essays on selected artworks.

Popular Painters & Other Visionaries is presented by the MetLife Foundation. Leadership support provided by Tony Bechara. Additional support provided by Isabel & Julio Nazario and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

En Foco: The New York Puerto Rican Experience, 1973-1974

El Museo del Barrio presents En Foco: The New York Puerto Rican Experience, 1973–74. The exhibition centers on a single portfolio of 79 photographs by founding members of the Bronx-based collective, Charles Biasiny-Rivera, Roger Cabán, and Felipe Dante, who each focus on the themes of Education, Small Business, and Labor. The images offer a rich visual testament of New York’s Puerto Rican population, with community members photographing their own lived reality. Donated to El Museo del Barrio by En Foco in 1976, this exhibition marks the first time the portfolio is exhibited in full since 1979.

In addition to the complete selection of photographs, the show is supplemented with posters, exhibition catalogues, and other ephemera related to En Foco’s historical engagement with El Museo del Barrio.

A photo-book will be published including reproductions of all images in the portfolio, archival materials, a new scholarly essay commissioned and historical texts.

En Foco: The New York Puerto Rican Experience, 1973–74 is made possible thanks to Tony Bechara, the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor, the New York State Legislature, and New York State Senator José M. Serrano. Additional support provided by The Nazario Family Fund. Special thanks to En Foco Inc.

Estamos Bien — La Trienal 20/21

Curated by El Museo’s Chief Curator Rodrigo Moura; Curator, Susanna V. Temkin; and Guest Curator, Elia Alba

El Museo del Barrio presents ESTAMOS BIEN – LA TRIENAL 20/21, the museum’s first national large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art featuring more than 40 artists from across the United States and Puerto Rico. Originally planned for Fall 2020, the show was reconceived and expanded as a yearlong initiative, later debuting in the summer of 2020 with online projects followed by an onsite exhibition in Las Galerías (Galleries) that opened in Spring 2021. Related public programs featuring curators, artists, invited scholars and other guests were held throughout the year.

ESTAMOS BIEN – LA TRIENAL 20/21 was inspired by the critically acclaimed and historic The (S) Files exhibitions held at El Museo between 1999 and 2013, which provided a platform for emerging Latino and Latin American artists from the New York metropolitan region. Reconceived as a Triennial, the exhibition for the first time has expanded its scope to a national scale including artists from California, Texas, Florida, Chicago, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, as well as from the Tristate Area. Utilizing an intersectional approach to Latinx identity, the Curatorial team has selected artists representing a diversity of generations, genders, ethnic, and racial backgrounds.

This first iteration of the triennial borrows its title, ESTAMOS BIEN, from the work of participating artist Candida Alvarez, a former member of El Museo’s curatorial team in the 1970s and the only artist in the show with a previous exhibition history with the institution. Her painting Estoy Bien (2017) takes its title from the resilient and obliquely sarcastic response to the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Now pluralized, the phrase resonates with the present-day moment, as the works in the exhibition address issues of race and identity politics, gentrification and displacement, climate change, as well as the particular effects of the global pandemic to Latinx and other BIPOC populations.

ABOUT LA TRIENAL CURATORS

Elia Alba is a multidisciplinary artist, who works in sculpture, photography and video. She has exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Smithsonian Museum of Art, Washington D.C.; Perez Art Museum Miami; National Museum of Art, Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the 10th Havana Biennial. Alba has received the Studio Museum in Harlem Artist-in Residence Program; the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and most recently the Anonymous Was A Woman award. A published author, her recent book, Elia Alba, The Supper Club, (Hirmer, June 2019), critically acclaimed by The New York Times and produced by the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, brought together artists, scholars and performers of diasporic cultures to examine race and culture in the United States through photography, food and dialogue.

Rodrigo Moura is a curator, writer and editor working in contemporary and modern art and currently serving as Chief Curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York. As the Adjunct Curator of Brazilian Art at Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand between 2016 and 2019, he curated and co-curated exhibitions such as Djanira: Picturing Brazil (2019), Melvin Edwards: Lynch Fragments (2018), Who’s afraid of Teresinha Soares? (2017), and Portinari Popular (2016). Prior to this, he was the Artistic Director of Instituto Inhotim (Minas Gerais, Brasil) between 2014 and 2015, where he also worked as a curator between 2004 and 2013. Independently, he has curated critically acclaimed exhibitions such as Time Kills: Moving Image from the Julia Stoscheck Collection (Sesc Paulista, 2019), Visiones de la tierra / El Mundo Planeado: Coleccion Luis Paulo Montenegro (Santander Art Room, Madrid, 2018), Mauro Restiffe: Album (Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2017), DOUBLES, DOBROS, PLIEGUES, PARES, TWINS, MITADES (The Warehouse, Dallas, 2017), artevida (several venues, Rio de Janeiro, 2014) and LINES (Hauser & Wirth Zurich, 2014), among several others.

Susanna V. Temkin is a Curator at El Museo del Barrio, where she most recently organized the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, Culture and the People: El Museo del Barrio, 1969-2019, drawing from objects from the Permanent Collection. Prior to this, she served as Assistant Curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres, Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin earned her master’s and PhD degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where her research concentrated on modern art in the Americas, with a focus on Cuba. She has published essays and reviews in the Rutgers Art Review, Burlington Magazine, and Hemispheres, and authored the chronology of Concrete Cuba: Cuba Geometric Abstraction from the 1950s, produced by David Zwirner Books.

ESTAMOS BIEN – LA TRIENAL 20/21 was made possible by The Jacques & Natasha Gelman Foundation. Leadership support is provided by The Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Commissioned works are made possible by Tony Bechara. Major funding is provided by Morgan Stanley and The Lenore G. Tawney Foundation. Generous funding is provided by The Cowles Charitable Trust and La Trienal Council: Craig Robins and Jackie Soffer, Estrellita and Daniel Brodsky and The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation. Additional support is provided by the El Museo Fund.

The Memorial… A Donation by Raphael Montañez Ortiz

Raphael Montañez Ortiz started a new large-scale work, in a development of a series of assemblages in which he had been working for the past decade. In the spring of 2020, he began to relate the work, inspired by the genocide of indigenous peoples during the European invasion of the Americas, to the impact caused by Covid-19 among Latinx and BIPOC populations in the United States. Last summer, Montañez Ortiz decided to donate the work to El Museo del Barrio, the institution he founded in 1969. The condition he put in place was that the work should be presented in 2020, in order to ensure its resonance in the context of the global pandemic. The work was completed after several months gathering material purchased online, presented in a specially created display case. This structure echoes the shape of various exhibition apparatuses and their colonial genealogies — from the cabinet of curiosities to the diorama and the reliquary. Inside are presented pages of books, replicas of gold nuggets, bones, feathers, and weapons, all alluding to the invasion of the Americas. The orchestration of these objects articulates recurring interests in the artist’s practice since the 1960s, such as colonialism, destruction, authentication, magic, and animism. Described in the artist’s own words “a personal prophecy”, he relates the piece to recent events as well as to his own mortality: “I put myself into this piece.”

With its monumental title (The Memorial to the Sadistic Holocaust Destruction of Millions of Our Ancient Arawak-Taino-Latinx Ancestors Begun in 1492 by Columbus and His Mission to With the Conquistadores Colonize and Deliver to Spain the Wealth of the New World no Matter the Human Cost to the New World’s Less Than Human Aborigine Inhabitants…), the work is presented here together with another item from El Museo’s permanent collection, an English edition of the book by Fr. Bartolome de las Casas. Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las indias was first published in 1552 and is one of the earliest and most important historical accounts documenting the brutal treatment of indigenous cultures by the Spanish conquerors.

This presentation anticipates the retrospective that will celebrate Montañez Ortiz’s more than sixty-year career, scheduled for the end of 2021. With this major donation, the founder of the Museum creates a gesture that expands and deepens his legacy in the institution.

Taller Boricua: A Political Print Shop in New York

In celebration of Taller Boricua’s 50th anniversary, El Museo del Barrio presents Taller Boricua: A Political Print Shop in New York, the first monograph exhibition in three decades about the East Harlem-based Nuyorican collective workshop and alternative space. Best known for its cultural empowerment and political activism, the organization commonly known as ‘The Puerto Rican Workshop,” began as a printmaking studio, produced and circulated hundreds of prints by artists. The prints, produced mainly in the 1970s, centered on issues of Puerto Rican independence, workers’ rights, and anti-imperialism both locally and in the Caribbean and Latin America, issues that remain relevant today.

Curated by Rodrigo Moura, Chief Curator of El Museo del Barrio, the exhibition is comprised of more than 200 works and ephemera, including serigraphs, lithographs, linocuts, paintings, assemblages, collages, and drawings by founding and early members, including Marcos Dimas, Carlos Osorio (1927 – 1984), Jorge Soto Sánchez (1947 – 1987), Nitza Tufiño, and Rafael Tufiño (1922 – 2008), among several others. Works in the show draws from El Museo’s Permanent Collection, Taller’s extensive archives, as well as other collections.

A recognized space for political activism, Taller Boricua is one of several Puerto Rican organizations created in New York City around the same time, as the Young Lords and El Museo del Barrio, and has mentored several generations of artists, art historians, and curators. The space served as a focal point for the affirmation of identity as it relates to artistic production in the diaspora, as well as its connections with non-Western art history narratives. Focused on its first decade of existence, the exhibition also looks at the close relationship between Taller Boricua and El Museo del Barrio, examining their common members, ethos, and the artists’ role in the creation of a visual identity for the Museum’s programs and exhibitions in its early years.

Leadership support for this exhibition is provided by Tony Bechara. Generous funding is provided by The de la Cruz Martínez Family and Encarnita Valdes Quinlan and Robert C. Quinlan. Additional support is provided by Richard Torres.