Past Archives - Page 3 of 8 - El Museo del Barrio

Lucio Fontana: Spatial Environment (1968)

El Museo del Barrio is pleased to present artist Lucio Fontana’s 1968 Spatial Environment [Ambiente Spaziale]. Conceived in relation to the artist’s innovative Spatialism movement, starting from 1949, Fontana’s Spatial Environments are immersive environments that viewers enter and navigate. Reconstructed with the authorization of the Fondazione Lucio Fontana, the all-white, labyrinthine Spatial Environment (1968) at El Museo will follow the exact specifications of the artist’s final work in the series, originally conceived and presented at documenta 4 in Kassel, Germany shortly before Fontana’s death.

The installation coincides with the exhibition at The Met Breuer Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold (on view January 23 through April 14, 2019), curated by Iria Candela, Estrellita B. Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art in The Met’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art.

The presentation of Lucio Fontana: Spatial Environment (1968) at El Museo del Barrio is made possible with support from Angela Westwater.

BEFORE YOUR VISIT

We invite you to enter and walk inside Spatial Environment (1968). Please read carefully and follow the guidelines below to help preserve the integrity of the installation:

• Do not touch the walls or sculptural elements.
• A maximum of two people are allowed inside at a time.
• Shoes are not allowed inside the installation.
• Please wear socks or use the disposable shoe guards available. High heels are not allowed.
• Please listen to the directions of museum guards.
• Children must be accompanied by an adult.

Anyone who wishes to access the works at all times does so at their own risk and responsibility. El Museo del Barrio shall therefore be held free of any liability and/or harm to visitors and their belongings.

Please be aware, entrance into the installation is not advisable for anyone uncomfortable in closed spaces; those who suffer from claustrophobia, panic attacks, or are susceptible to disorientation; or those with alternate physical mobility.

ABOUT LUCIO FONTANA

Argentine born Lucio Fontana (b. 1899 – d. 1968) is recognized for his explorations of energy and dimensionality, as reflected in his characteristic approach of punching holes and cutting tears into the surfaces of his paintings, sculptures, and installations. The child of Italian parents, Fontana was born in Rosario, Argentina, and moved back and forth between Italy and Argentina throughout his life. After beginning his career as a figurative sculptor in Rosario, the artist briefly studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera before returning to Argentina on the cusp of WWII. There, with Jorge Romero Brest and Jorge Larco, he founded the Altamira art school in Buenos Aires, and with his students published the 1946 Manifiesto Blanco. This document forms the incipient manifestation of Fontana’s theory of Spatialism, which he would continue to develop upon his definitive return to Italy in 1947. A well-recognized artistic figure within his lifetime, Fontana exhibited his work at the Venice Biennale and Documenta 4. His art is included in major collections throughout the globe.

Picking Up the Pieces: An intimate view of life post-María

Picking Up the Pieces is an intimate look at life post-Hurricane María in Puerto Rico, and the unfortunate “new normal” of its people. Comprised of drawings, installations, and photographs that reflect unforgettable moments experienced by artist Adrián Viajero Román’s travels throughout the island, the installation creates portraits of individual lives profoundly touched by trauma and tragedy, and resilience.

Picking Up the Pieces es una mirada intima a la vida en Puerto Rico después del paso de Huracán Maria, y la desafortunada nueva vida de su gente. Compuesto de dibujos, instalaciones, y fotografías que reflejan los inolvidable momentos vividos por el artista Adrian Viajero Roman durante sus viajes a la isla, la instalación crea retratos de la vidas individuales profundamente afectada por trauma, tragedia, y resistencia.

Adrian Roman, also known as Viajero, was born in New York City of Puerto Rican descent. Throughout his travels to the Caribbean, Central America, Africa, and a number of cities across the United States, he has exposed himself to a variety of cultures that have influenced his work. Viajero is an artist resident of the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn New York, and works closely with the Caribbean Cultural Center African Disapora Institute in New York City. In 2012, he exhibited at Museo de Arte de Caguas, Puerto Rico as part of the group show AFROLATINOS, which was awarded Best Exhibit 2012 by International Association of Art Critics. Viajero was most recently nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation grant for sculpture. He has exhibited in solo and group shows in the United States and Puerto Rico.

Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography

The American city underwent unprecedented transformations after World War II. As middle-class populations shifted to the suburbs and new highways cut through thriving neighborhoods, many cities began to experience economic and social disintegration, especially in Black, Latino, and working class communities. Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography unites the work of ten artists who critically reflect on the state of urban America primarily between the 1960s and early 1980s, when government initiatives that sought to address the needs of cities in crisis sparked public debate. The title is drawn from Piri Thomas’s classic 1967 memoir, Down These Mean Streets. Like Thomas, their work challenges perceptions of embattled cities and explores the human narratives that unfolded in communities across the United States.

This exhibition examines how Latino photographers, many of whom came of age in urban neighborhoods, frame their environment. They approach the street not as detached observers but as engaged participants by turning to portraiture, urbanscapes, serial photography, or unconventional manipulations of the photographic image. Many contribute to a long tradition of socially driven documentary photography. Others embrace conceptual strategies or use color photography to capture a less romantic image of the American city. Their work reexamines neighborhoods often viewed as places of social decline and affirms the strength of community in urban America.

Organized by E. Carmen Ramos, SAAM’s deputy chief curator and curator of Latino art, the exhibition explores the work of ten photographers. To read artist bios, click here.

Rather than approach the neighborhoods as detached observers, these artists deeply identified with their subject. Activist and documentary photographer Frank Espada captured humanizing portraits of urban residents in their decaying surroundings. Hiram Maristany and Winston Vargas lovingly captured street life in historic Latino neighborhoods in New York City, offering rare glimpses of bustling community life that unfolded alongside urban neglect and community activism. Working in Los Angeles, Oscar Castillo captured both the detritus of urban renewal projects and the cultural efforts of residents to shape their own neighborhoods. Perla de Leon’s poignant photographs of the South Bronx in New York—one of the most iconic blighted neighborhoods in American history—place into sharp relief the physical devastation of the neighborhood and the lives of the people who called it home.

John Valadez’s vivid portraits of stylish young people in East Los Angeles counter the idea of inner cities as places of crime. Camilo José Vergara and Anthony Hernandez adopt a cooler, conceptual approach in their serial projects, which return to specific urban sites over and over, inviting viewers to consider the passage of time in neighborhoods transformed by the urban crisis. The barren “concrete” landscapes of Ruben Ochoa and Manuel Acevedo pivot on unconventional artistic strategies such as the merging photography and drawing, to inspire a second look at the physical features of public space that shape the lives of urban dwellers.

Liliana Porter: Other Situations

Other Situations is a non-linear survey of Porter’s work from 1973 to 2018, which explores the conflicting boundaries between reality and fiction, and the ways in which images are circulated and consumed. Organized by SCAD Museum of Art and curated by Humberto Moro, SCAD Curator of Exhibitions, this is the artist’s first museum solo show in New York City in more than 25 years. The exhibition highlights the fundamental distinction that Porter creates between the notions of “narrative” and “situation” in contrast to the structures implicit in most stories that suggest a relationship with time, and in which the artist is not interested. In her work, the past and future of an action becomes irrelevant in light of the urgency and absurdity of the problems faced by the figures portrayed. Sometimes paired in conversation or arranged in larger groups, Porter’s characters — a pantheon of cultural figures such as Elvis Presley, Che Guevara, Jesus, Mickey Mouse and Benito Juárez — evokes questions about representation, image dissemination and public life, and are particularly relevant in present times, when the fields of politics, spectacle and celebrity culture collide and merge. Among the significant pieces included in the exhibition are Porter’s 1970s photographs alluding to space and the body, and more recent works like the “Forced Labor” series, in which the artist utilizes miniature figurines to make a statement about reality, labor and self-awareness.

Along with the exhibition, this fall, Porter will present a new theater performance, a medium that she has explored in recent years in close collaboration with artist Ana Tiscornia. Specially commissioned for the occasion, the performance will be presented at the renowned performance art space, The Kitchen. In addition, El Museo del Barrio will produce a publication focusing on artist Liliana Porter’s theatrical output – the first of its kind– in an effort to further disseminate the artist’s work and legacy.

ABOUT LILIANA PORTER

Born in Argentina in 1941, Liliana Porter, originally educated in printmaking — a discipline that deeply influenced her practice — moved to New York in 1964, where she cofounded the New York Graphic Workshop with artists Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo. Since then, Porter has worked in a variety of media including painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, assemblages, video, installation and, more recently, theater. Porter’s art has been exhibited in more than 35 countries in over 450 group shows, and is a part of public and private collections including El Museo del Barrio. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, and Sculpture Magazine, among other publications. In 2013, the Fundación Patricia Phelps de Cisneros published the book Liliana Porter in Conversation with Inés Katzenstein as part of the Conversaciones/Conversations series. Galleries in Europe, Latin America and the United States represent the artist.

Liliana Porter: Other Situations is made possible through major support from the Jacques & Natasha Gelman Foundation, series sponsor of El Museo del Barrio’s Women ’s Retrospective Series. Additional support is provided by Estrellita and Daniel Brodsky, and Patricia Marshall.

REVIVAL: Contemporary Pattern & Decoration

El Museo del Barrio, the Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture and the Bronx Council on the Arts present their first-ever joint exhibition titled REVIVAL: Contemporary Pattern and Decoration at the Longwood Art Gallery @ Hostos in the Bronx. Guest curated by Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, and a part of Hostos Community College’s 50th anniversary celebration, the group exhibition explores a renewed interest in pattern and decoration by contemporary artists in various media featuring works by 26 artists. Such interest builds upon a movement that developed in the 1970s, when artists began to explore the possibilities of pattern and focused on the repetition of color, line, and shape. The movement became known as “Pattern and Decoration,” or more generally “P & D.” In part, this was a response to the severity of the Minimalist movement that was dominated by large-scale works by male artists.

REVIVAL: Contemporary Pattern and Decoration reflects contemporary concerns of living artists who evoke both pattern and the body as forms of symbolic and visual language. The body acts not only as a bearer of crucial social information, but also as a reminder of its historic role in all kinds of patterns and other image-making, such as wallpaper, fabric design, porcelain objects, and silhouette portrait painting. Today, artists evoke the bodies linked to internet searches, glossy magazine images, historic works of art, and other cultural monuments. Geometric lines evoke the historical significance of abstraction and the endless possibilities of line and form in pattern to evoke a variety of ideas, physical reactions, and subsequent responses. Taken together, the artists presented here explore a broad range of aesthetic approaches to both the body and pattern as interconnected and meaningful elements of artistic production.

QUEENIE: Selected artworks by female artists from El Museo del Barrio’s Collection

Hunter East Harlem Gallery (HEHG) at Hunter College and El Museo del Barrio are pleased to present the exhibition QUEENIE: Selected artworks by female artists from El Museo del Barrio’s Collection. The group exhibition features a selection of works from the East Harlem-based museum’s Permanent Collection that prompt a multifarious dialogue not only around society and gender but simultaneously refutes a homogenized view of Latinx art. With a particular focus on female artists from the Caribbean, Latin America, and the larger Latinx diaspora, QUEENIE explores the roles women have played in El Museo del Barrio’s history and its impact on the local East Harlem community.

Including works by Tania Bruguera, Margarita Cabrera, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Melba Carillo, Marta Chilindron, Alessandra Expósito, Iliana Emilia Garcia, Dulce Gomez, Cristina Hernández Botero, Carmen Herrera, Jessica Kairé, Carmen Lomas Garza, Evelyn López de Guzmán, Anna Maria Maiolino, Ana Mendieta, Marina Núñez del Prado, Liliana Porter, Raquel Rabinovich, Scherezade, Nitza Tufiño, among others.

QUEENIE takes its title from a sculpture by Alessandra Expósito, a painted horse skull that illustrates an imagined story of a young girl and her pet horse. As part of the exhibition, HEHG has invited three NYC-based artists: Melissa Calderón, Alessandra Expósito, and Glendalys Medina to respond to the exhibition with a commissioned artwork that further explores the connections among the collecting process, societal change, and gendered experience.

QUEENIE is organized by Arden Sherman, Curator, Hunter East Harlem Gallery; Noel Valentin, Permanent Collection Manager, El Museo del Barrio; Elizaveta Shneyderman, Gallery Manager, Hunter East Harlem Gallery; and Olivia Gauthier, Gund Curatorial Fellow, Hunter College.

elmuseo@SVA: May Contain Moving Parts

In its second iteration, “elmuseo@SVA” represents a coming together of two New York institutions: El Museo del Barrio and the School of Visual Arts. Founded by artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz and local activists, parents and teachers in East Harlem, El Museo del Barrio’s original mission was to support the art and culture of Puerto Ricans in New York. By the early 1970s that mission expanded to include all of Latin American and Latino communities here.

May Contain Moving Parts brings together a varied group of works that focus on different kinds of mechanisms and systems.. In engineering applications, the phrase “may contain moving parts” is used as a cautionary statement. These words also signify that the motion of a mechanism or system may be affected by inertia and that it may change throughout various phases of its working movement. We can explore this as a kind of call to attention on change and adaptation, on movement and stillness.

The artists grouped together here relate to one another in their methods of approaching ideas around systems or motion, or in their choice of media, or in the expressive ends of their work. Here, we might see the use of sound or movement as symbolic language, the adaptation of a visceral object or complex scene to achieve a desired reaction. In some cases, they entice the viewer to become the player, the philosopher, or the activist. Landscape is rendered as both haunting pattern and oppressive atmosphere. An object may be de-contextualized and relieved of its intended function in order to play a different role. The artists consider the various signs of movement; explore possibilities of the meaning and function of objects or parts; and meditate on the relationship of place, motion, form and space to the individual.

We are grateful to the artists for their participation and generosity.

Graciela Cassel (2014), Willie Cole, Jon Gomez (2017), Franco Frontera, Jonas Lara (2012), Arnaldo Morales, Marylin Narota (2016), Aya Rodriguez-Izumi (2017), and Jennifer Santos (2012).

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Graciela Cassel is a multimedia artist who works with video installations and sculpture to explore ideas of subjectivity, change and border politics. She was born in Buenos Aires, lives in New York City and has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions in the U.S., Argentina and the Netherlands. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York (2014), her MA from New York University (2012), and her BA from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (1980).

Willie Cole is a sculptor based in New York. His work has shown work at Montclair Art Museum (2006), University of Wyoming Art Museum (2006), the Tampa Museum of Art (2004), Miami Art Museum (2001), Bronx Museum of the Arts (2001) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998). In 2010, a survey exhibition of his work on paper (1975 – 2010) took place at the James Gallery and later traveled to many cities. In January 2013, “Complex Conversations: Willie Cole Sculptures and Wall Works” opened at the Albertine Monroe-Brown Gallery at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

Franco Frontera is a multimedia artist who works with painting and sound. He was born in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, and lives in New York City. He received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts (2016) and his BFA from the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, Santurce, Puerto Rico (2013). He has exhibited his works at individual shows at the Flight Cult Gallery and the Calle Cerra, Puerto Rico (2014). He has also participated in group shows at venues such as the Caribbean Social Club (2016), The Lounge (2016), the Galeria Yemayá (2014) and the Flight Cult Gallery (2013), among others.

Jon Gomez is a Mexican-American multimedia artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from the School of Visual Arts with an MFA in 2017. As an artist born in Los Angeles and raised in Mexico, his works travel freely between the universals of Southern California and the lived reality of Latin American communities. Landscapes that predate U.S. expansionism often feature in his recent installations—lands that frame the evolution of immigration, identity, and nationalism in 21st-century America.

Jonas Lara is a photographer, mixed-media artist and musician. Lara joined the U.S. Marines in 2000, started working as an artist in 2003, and has exhibited at several solo and group shows, including an individual exhibition at the Carnegie Art Museum Studio Gallery (2015). He received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts (2012) and his BFA from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California.

Arnaldo Morales is a multimedia artist who works with industrial materials, low-tech manual devices and mechanical systems. Born in Puerto Rico, he has lived and worked in New York City since 1996. He has shown work at El Museo del Barrio, The Americas Society, and White Box (all in New York), the Galería de la Raza (San Francisco), and The Living Art Museum (Reykjavik, Iceland), among other venues.

Marilyn Narota combines art and psychology to produce socially engaged installations, sculptures and performance-based videos. She was born in Colombia and lives in New York City. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts (2016), her post- baccalaureate degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2013) and her BA from Williams College (2006). She is the founder of collaborative artist initiatives such as Sly Space, Kaur Studio, FussionArt Magazine and Artilade magazine. Her work has been exhibited at the School of Visual Arts, The Hole, El Museo de Los Sures, and Project for Empty Space.

Aya Rodriguez-Izumi is a multimedia artist who works with sculpture, music, installation and performance. She has spent her life moving back and forth between New York City and her birthplace of Okinawa, Japan, and her work often deals with the topics of socio-cultural identity and communication. Since graduating from Parsons, the New School for Design, she has been included in various group shows and has shown at such venues as MoCADA, The Knockdown Center, Free Candy and FLUX Art Fair. She is currently an MFA Fine Arts degree candidate at the School of Visual Arts.

Jenny Santos is a New York City-based multimedia artist who works predominantly in sculpture and installation. Her work often explores the tension between opinions, reality and the unstable, shifting appearances of daily life. Santos exhibited recent works at NURTUREart Gallery, New York (2014), and has participated in group exhibitions at the School of Visual Arts, and Project 165 in Toronto, Canada. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts (2012), and her BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto (2007). She has received the Ontario Arts Council Visual Artist Grant (2014), among other awards.

Dreaming up North: Children on the Move Across the Americas

Dreaming up North: Children on the Move Across the Americas is a special exhibition in honor of Migration at El Museo del Barrio, revolving around testimonies (in graphic, oral and written form) of immigrant children moving across the Americas. Collected by a team of six anthropologists and three photographers, each working separately, the exhibition depicts migrant children from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador, and Nicaragua. Dreaming up North draws upon interviews and workshops developed in humanitarian shelters, detention centers and transit areas within children’s hometowns and their new homes in the United States. Themes covered include: Mexico’s internal child migration and repatriation, transnational child migration from as far as Ecuador, the daily lives of migrant children in the US, and children’s future migration plans.

Dreaming up North aims to highlight the migrant children experience, in order to foster opportunities to understand this transnational phenomenon through their own voices and memories. By doing this we hope to contribute to a more complex and nuanced view of child migration. Such a view recognizes the tremendous suffering, stress, and danger that migrant children experience, but also illustrates that migrant children are not mere victims, being moved around by criminals or feckless parents. Instead, it argues that their mobility is also a result of the decisions and actions children take in order to shape their own futures in the face of failed national policies, insufficient international mechanisms of support and growing global inequality. When children migrate, they are claiming a human right, they are going home to their parents after many years apart, they are looking for an income that will provide their siblings with the opportunities they didn’t have, they are resisting gangs and drug cartels’ strategies of fear and domination. They are challenging our understanding of childhood, innocence, dependency, agency, citizenship, geography and time. They are asking us to reshape our conventional perceptions to be able to create a better, more understanding world, where borders aren’t walls that keep us apart, but spaces for new possibilities and learning.

EXHIBITION CREDITS

Dreaming up North: Children on the Move Across the Americas is presented by El Museo del Barrio, in collaboration with Colectiva Infancias, and a network of social anthropologists and photographers.

Coordination and assembly: Valentina Glockner | Script and museography: Soledad Álvarez and Valentina Glockner | Research: Ana Luz Minera, Cinthya Santos, Sandra Guillot, Sarah Gallo, Soledad Álvarez Velasco, Tamara Segura, Valentina Glockner | Photographic documentation: Cinthya Santos, Katie Orlinsky, Luis Enrique Aguilar, Valentina Glockner | Map design: Elvira Morán, with information from Soledad Álvarez, Tamara Segura, Valentina Glockner | Comics: Javier Beverido

In honor and thanks to the knowledge and trust of: Migrant children and adolescents working in agricultural fields in Chihuahua, Morelos and Michoacán, held at the Tapachula detention center in Chiapas, in transit at the shelters of Ixtepec, Oaxaca and Tenosique, Tabasco, and returned to the home communities of their families in Puebla, Mexico.

The exhibition is based on the experience of children and adolescents from Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Ecuador and the United States. The testimonies exposed are transcriptions of the narratives obtained during the research work and photographic documentation.

OCCUPY MUSEUMS: Debtfair

Occupy Museums (Arthur Polendo, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Kenneth Pietrobono, Noah Fischer, Tal Beery) presents Debtfair Bundle: artists affected by the Puerto Rican debt crisis, 2017. This project, first shown at the Whitney Museum’s Biennial 2017, is here reconceived by the artists of Occupy Museums to focus on the Puerto Rican debt crisis and the art-related debt of artists on the island. This project features works by artists Yasmin Hernández, Sofía Maldonado, Celestino Junior Ortiz, Norma Vila Rivero, Gamaliel Rodríguez, Adrian Viajero Román, Melquiades Rosario-Sastre, Nibia Pastrana Santiago, Jose Soto, and Gabriella Torres-Ferrer.

Occupy Museums notes: Debtfair is based around a single question we asked of artists and the cultural community at large: “how does your economic reality affect your art?” What we have found is that personal debt––from student loans to credit cards to mortgages––plays a major role in the lives artists can lead and, ultimately, in what their work looks like. In bringing this question into a luxury art museum like the Whitney, Debtfair connects the boom of the art market with the boom of the debt market as linked realities. By asking artists to speak openly about their economic realities we hope to open a conversation that is currently taboo, demystify the ways in which our debts are connected, and produce a new lens through which we can see how art is connected to the economic conditions in which it is produced. And, of course, economic conditions cannot be separated from social and political conditions just as personal debts cannot be separated from the collective debts that we as a society hold––national debt, colonial debt, debt to the original inhabitants of this land, and debt to the enslaved Africans who built this country.

One of the early decisions in designing Debtfair was that we would show the work not on the walls but inside the walls. For us, this represents a hidden yet pervasive reality that we seek to uncover. Within the cutout shape are artworks of 30 artists who joined Debtfair. The works are framed between the exposed wall studs. Above and below the artworks are gray boards which serve as placeholders for artworks and symbolize a continuation of so many more unnamed artists who are affected by debt, but whose actual artworks are not present.

Bundles

In creating this project, our group had to select 30 artists from more than 500 who joined the project, so we acted more or less like curators. However, while curators usually select artworks based on content or quality, we selected these artists based on information relating to the kinds of debts they hold. You will notice that behind the artworks are custom wallpapers of different colors and patterns. These patterns demarcate the three different “bundles” that we are exhibiting. The word bundle is not used by accident––it is meant to echo the bundles of debt that are traded by banks and investment firms.

If you look to the left of the wall, the pattern behind the artworks contains small images of the Puerto Rican flag, Banco Popular, and First Bank of Puerto Rico. The artists in this section each have a direct relation to these financial institutions and to the Puerto Rican debt crisis. In 2015, the US government and large hedge funds signed a deal called Promesa with Puerto Rico that bound the territory with heavy austerity measures. Puerto Rico is effectively a modern-day colony of the United States; its residents do not have full citizenship, its resources have been plundered, and its economy is designed to fill the coffers of US corporations. The ten artists on the left side of the wall have been affected by this situation.

With Debtfair, Occupy Museums calls on artists and the art public to recognize the two booms of the art market: that of the financialized art object and that of artist debt. The American artist is a debtor: seven out of ten of the most expensive schools in the United States are art schools and the national chain of Art Institutes (Ai) have proven to be highly predatory higher education ventures. However, the American artist is a debtor in Puerto Rico simply by virtue of connection to the colonial debt crisis whose power imbalance between debtor and creditor is embodied in the Promesa Bill. Here, Occupy Museums presents a “bundle” of 10 artworks by 10 artists directly affected by the Puerto Rican Debt crisis whose personal debts total $648,224.67. This collective debt includes First Bank of Puerto Rico and Banco Popular, among many institutions. The Bundle is presented framed by a graph that tracks the growth of Puerto Rican debt from 2010-2015: an economic abstraction that affects both lives and culture.

About Occupy Museums

Occupy Museums is a collective of artists and activists that emerged directly from the Occupy Wall Street movement; most of our members met in Zuccotti Park in 2011. The common goal of Occupy Museums is to bring the critique of wealth and inequality directly to the cultural sphere where finance and aesthetics currently collude. In one previous example of our work, we supported the struggle of Teamsters Union Local 814 who were fighting against a lockout by their employer, Sotheby’s. The auction house wanted to cut their pay and union rights while selling paintings for tens of millions of dollars to the tune of record profits. This reflects the anti-worker mentality seen in Corporate America generally and it shouldn’t be accepted in the arts or any industry. Much of our work has taken the form of direct actions on the streets and actions in museums like MoMA designed to pause business as usual to call out specific injustices perpetuated by said museum. But in this project we have worked closely with the Whitney Museum. Our goal is to create a new way of looking at art objects. We want people to see not only the colors, forms, meanings intended by the artists, but also the often withering economic realities that frame the practice of art in America today.

Artist, activist, researcher and educator Yazmin Hernandez, requested a statement be read on her behalf during a public program. To read, click here.

OCCUPY MUSEUMS: Debtfair, and its accompanying public program is supported, in part, by CLACS and Latino Studies, NYU.

uptown: nasty women/bad hombres

As part of its participation in The Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University’s first Uptown triennial, El Museo del Barrio presents an exhibition of artists living or working in El Barrio, Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood. El Museo’s uptown: nasty women/bad hombres presents the work of artists engaging with the legacies of sexism, racism, homophobia, the power of the media, the state of health care and our natural environment, and violence in various ways. The artists explore these issues through poetry, symbolism, and metaphor or by exploring particular forms of artistic practice associated with rupture or bearing witness as a form of social protest. Some employ gendered or radical forms of art making for their purposes. Collage, documentary photography, poetic text, painting, needlepoint, textile work and video are all methods enlisted by these artists to create works that deal with various social issues.

Artists included in the exhibition are: Elan Cadiz, Vladimir Cybil Charlier, Pepe Coronado, COCO144/Roberto Gualtieri, Jaime Davidovich, Carlos De Jesus, Rene De Los Santos, Francisco Donoso FEEGZ/Carlos Jesús Martínez Domínguez, Sandra Fernández, Marquita Flowers, Reynaldo García Pantaleón, Alex Guerrero, Leslie Jiménez, Lauren Kelley, Rejin Leys, Stephanie Lindquist, Miguel Luciano, Luanda Lozano, Ivan Monforte, José Morales, Darío Oleaga, Jaime Permuth, Kenny Rivero, Moses Ros-Suarez, José Rodríguez, Aya Rodríguez-Izumi, Ruben Natal-San Miguel, Sable Elyse Smith, Rider Ureña, Regina Viqueira, and Nari Ward.

SELECTED ARTIST QUOTE

Ivan Monforte | My art uses simple gestures and materials, as well as emotional language and content as strategic tools to address themes of loss and mourning, representations of class, gender, race and sexuality and the pursuit of love. These gestures typically involve highly emotional and participatory interactions between an individual, an audience, and me. They often result in social sculptures, performance-based videos, and text-based objects. The economy of the work is rooted in my artistic investment in dialogue and inclusion. I am interested in the complex intellectual and emotional dialogue that can occur between a viewer and the artwork – in particular, the conversation that takes place afterwards, when the viewer is left to process the interaction. Ideally, inspiring people to re-examine and respect/accept universal truths grounded in emotions.

Stephanie A. Lindquist | I’m fascinated by process-oriented art that privileges the formation of art as a rite or ritual. With time, the objects and images near me become props and stages for the plays I create. For me, sculpture is a vehicle to translate the concept of time, physically activated by me. My old towels, my favorite lapas, they are my personal relics, symbols of me, women, culture.

Kenny Rivero | As I work through a variety of media, primarily painting, drawing, and sculpture, I often begin by contemplating the convoluted histories of New York City and the Dominican Republic. Along with the occasional reference to popular narratives and accepted notions of history, the content of my work pulls from anecdotes from my own family and the collective memory developed by the people living in these two places. Ultimately, my aim is to deconstruct the histories and identities I have been conditioned to understand as absolute, in order to reengineer these parts into new wholes, with new functions. This process allows me to creatively explore, and come to terms with, the broken narrative of Dominican American identity, socio-geographic solidarity, familial expectations, race, and gender roles. As a result, I tend to consider the products of my practice syncretic in nature

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