ANTONIO LOPEZ: Future Funk Fashion

El Museo del Barrio is pleased to present an exhibition on the work of the fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez (1943-1987). This exhibition will explore various aspects of the work of this important artist, developing thematic sections that focus on high fashion illustration, his relationship to particular models, his shoe and jewelry designs, and images of people he came to know and love from the streets of New York City.

Antonio Lopez was born in Utuado, Puerto Rico on February 11, 1943. The family migrated to New York City when Antonio was seven and he attended P.S. 77 on East 104th Street. To keep her son off the streets, Lopez’s mother, a seamstress, would ask him to draw flowers for her embroideries. He also helped his father, a mannequin maker, to apply make-up and stitch wigs on the figures. At the age of twelve, Lopez earned a scholarship to the prestigious Traphagen School of Fashion in New York, which provided Saturday programs for children. He went on to attend the High School of Art and Design. Upon graduation, Lopez was accepted to the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Lopez went on to illustrate fashions for Women’s Wear Daily and The New York Times and eventually became a free-lance artist for many of the top fashion publications, including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle and Andy Warhol’s Interview. He is known to have “discovered” or formed lasting friendships with women like Pat Cleveland, Tina Chow, Jerry Hall, Grace Jones and Jessica Lange. He collaborated with the noted designer Charles James, creating an illustrated inventory of Charles’ fashion designs (now in the collection of the Chicago History Museum). With his friend and business partner, Juan Ramos, Lopez moved to Paris where they both worked with Karl Lagerfeld and many other designers.

Through his work, Lopez made great strides in exploring and representing the ethnic or racialized body within the world of high fashion. His imagery helped to develop and underscore a new canon of beauty throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He died in New York of complications related to AIDS on March 17, 1987 at the age of 44.

A team of art historians, scholars of fashion history, gender and communications studies and other experts will participate in the organization of this exhibition. The show’s co-curators are Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, Curator at El Museo del Barrio and Amelia Malagamba-Ansótegui, a scholar from Arizona State University and University of Texas San Antonio. In 2003, Dr. Malagamba wrote an important essay on Antonio Lopez for the Smithsonian Institution, which continues to be a key text today for the ways in which it explores Antonio’s attentiveness to race, gender and the body.

A selection of works in the exhibition come from the Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos, directed by Paul Caranicas. Additional works are borrowed from various private collections in New York City.

ANTONIO LOPEZ: Future Funk Fashion is made possible thanks to major support from Tony Bechara. Additional support provided by The Coby Foundation Ltd., and the New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and the New York City Council.

The Illusive Eye

El Museo del Barrio is pleased to present The Illusive Eye, an international survey on Kinetic and Op art. The exhibition offers a broad intellectual context for Op art and geometric abstraction, one that goes against the grain of formalist art history. The selection provides a special focus on artwork from the Americas and features major artists from eighteen countries in Latin America and beyond.

“The Illusive Eye is about illusions—those we see and feel when we look at Op and kinetic art and those experienced by the curators and art historians of these movements,” said Jorge Daniel Veneciano, Executive Director, El Museo and exhibition curator. “The perceptual play of things seen and unseen provides us with a model for understanding the relative invisibility of Latin American artists in past surveys of Op art.”

The Illusive Eye puts forth a reading of Op art and geometric abstraction that is notably different from that of prior exhibitions, which focused on the psychology and physiology of perception. El Museo’s exhibition traces the concepts and values of optical art to its esoteric origins in Pythagorean (Egyptian) and Theosophical (Eastern) mysticism. The Illusive Eye places Op art in a truly international context, beyond that of the narrow European model of modernism as perpetuated by Western museums.

The Illusive Eye embarks on three objectives:

First, we revisit and celebrate the innovations of the MoMA exhibition and flesh it out with the Latin American dimension that it lacked.

Second, we put forth a notably different reading of Op and Kinetic art—offering a discursive and critical response to the traditional studies dwelling on the physiology and psychology of vision.

Third, we propose a connection between the naturalizing (responsive) theories of optical art and the naturalized absence of Latin American artists from The Responsive Eye and similar curatorial projects. The few Latin Americans represented in the MoMA show each lived in Europe at the time of the exhibition. We therefore propose a link between the lessons in the phenomenology of illusions in Op art and the parallel illusions of curatorial vision—in which focus on one object requires the invisibility of others.

Exhibition curator: Jorge Daniel Veneciano, Ph.D., Executive Director, El Museo del Barrio; author of The Geometric Unconscious: A Century of Abstraction (University of Nebraska Press, 2012).

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Generous support for this exhibition is provided by Patricia & Ramiro J. Ortíz, Lo-Mid Corporation, and Public Support from the New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito. Additional support has been provided by Michael J. García & Liana M. Davila, The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), the Embassy of Chile, and El Museo’s Collector’s Circle.

Figure and Form: Recent Acquisitions to the Permanent Collection

This exhibition features a selection of recent acquisitions to El Museo’s permanent collection. It includes our most recent gift, a large painting by David Antonio Cruz, Puerto Rican Pieta, a portrait of the artist and his mother. This gift was made possible by a purchase grant from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation. It is accompanied by another large-scale self-portrait by Alessandra Expósito, a gift of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, and a set of body cast sculptures by artist Rigoberto Torres (Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, 1960) generously donated by artist and East Harlem resident John Ahearn. Works of photography, prints, sculpture, and ceramics accompany paintings in this multi-media exhibition that highlights the iconic presence of the human form in various ways. Quiet moments of (self) reflection are seen as are individual statements about the possibilities of a particular material, such as wood, ceramics, or the photograph. The artist is often present, as in a series of photographs by Ernesto Pujol (Cuba, 1957). Art stars from the last century such as Julio Alpuy (Uruguay, 1919-New York, 2009), the ceramicist Louis Mendez (New York, 1929-2012) and Nemesio Antunez (Chile, 1918-1993) are shown alongside younger artists such as Cruz (Philadelphia, 1974), Expósito (Buffalo, New York, 1967) and William Villalongo (Hollywood, Florida, 1975). The exhibition highlights the importance and generosity of collectors, artists, foundations and other institutions in the growth and development of El Museo’s collection.

Artists included in Figure and Form: Julio Alpuy, David Antonio Cruz, Nemesio Antúnez, caraballo-farman (Abou Farman and Leonor Caraballo), Luis Cruz Azaceta, Alessandra Expósito, Caio Fonseca, Louis Méndez, Ernesto Pujol, Nick Quijano, Chuck Ramírez, Analia Segal, Francisco Toledo, Rigoberto Torres, and William Villalongo.

HOMENAJE: The Traveling Exhibit Honoring Our Puerto Rican and Nuyorican Heroes

The driving force behind the photo series is to celebrate the contributions of our living heroes in our communities and highlight the work they have done to build the figurative and literal roads and bridges for others within the Puerto Rican community who have come after them.

The exhibit pays tribute to our Puerto Rican leaders and our voices. It recognizes our heroes and introduces them to a younger generation of Puerto Ricans. Instead of requiring them to travel to a gallery, the exhibit, itself, travels from Puerto Rican neighborhood to Puerto Rican neighborhood—right to the very places where Puerto Rican and Nuyorican people eat, sleep, work, socialize, shop and rest. Each poster features a black and white portrait of a hero aged 50 and older, and tells a loosely biographical story that reveals each hero’s unique personality and idiosyncrasies.

The posters are strung together in different configurations using clotheslines and clothespins—reminiscent of how clothes were dried from tenement windows and how clothes are still dried in many places in Puerto Rico. Who would have thought that those hand-me-downs and holey socks and tattered clothes hanging from those tenement windows in the 40s, 50s and 60s in those poor, immigrant communities would be the first items of clothing worn by today’s activists and poets, leaders and CEOs, doctors and opera singers, artists and community organizers, scientists and US Supreme Court justices?

Since October of 2014, HOMENAJE has traveled every two to four weeks from bodegas to senior centers to restaurants to local schools to community centers to dance studios to health care centers all across the city and has been exhibited in historical venues such as the Nuyorican Poets Café and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater.

Navideño: Three Kings and Nativities from El Museo’s Permanent Collection

This special exhibition will lead to and coincide with one of the most important popular traditions in many Puerto Rican and Latin American cultures, Three Kings Day, celebrated on January 6. Since 1978, El Museo del Barrio has commemorated Día de los Tres Reyes by organizing a community parade through East Harlem. This exhibition highlights some of the Three Kings and Nativity-related objects from El Museo’s permanent collection. A group of delicate wood-carvings by Puerto Rico’s santeros, depicting The Three Kings, are juxtaposed with Nativity scenes from various Latin American countries. Objects like these are typically displayed in the homes of those who celebrate the tradition, from December 6 to the Epiphany, or Three Kings Day. Accompanying these objects are traditional holiday posters by artists Antonio Maldonado and Lorenzo Homar. Also featured is a painting on the Three Kings theme by artist Scherezade García, introducing a contemporary version of this historic iconography.

This display is organized in honor of Carmen Ana and Joseph Unanue, friends and benefactors of El Museo del Barrio.

#CarvingThroughBorders | CultureStrike

CarvingThroughBorders emphasizes sharing skills and creating collaborative artistic work via oversize block prints that give life to migrants’ diverse experiences.

The project draws inspiration from historic graphic campaigns that shed light on the humanity of everyday people whose stories are too-often unseen and unheard. The works are a part of a collection of 13 oversized woodblock prints with pro‐migrant messaging commissioned by CultureStrike. Undocumented and documented artists from the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York and Florida were asked to illustrate various aspects of migration with a local, national or worldwide scope: detention, deportation, displacement, discrimination, exploitation, violence, youth, criminalization, legalization, and economic and ecological brutality wherever and however it occurs.

The first edition of prints was done with a steamroller on fabric by Master Printers from Syracuse University during the 42nd annual Southern Graphic Council Conference in San Francisco on March 29, 2014. The second edition of prints, shown here at El Museo Del Barrio, was printed on Sekishu paper at Favianna Rodriguez’s West Oakland studio by printmaster Nichol Markowitz.

ABOUT CULTURESTRIKE

CultureStrike works toward a society that recognizes and embraces migration and the migrant experience. We harness the power of culture to organize artists, writers and other culture makers to transform public views and sentiment around migration, and to fight for equity and full inclusion of migrants and their communities in the United States’ social fabric. For more on CultureStrike, visit the website, here.

¡PRESENTE! The Young Lords in New York

¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York explores the legacy of the Young Lords in East Harlem, the Bronx and the Lower East Side, focusing on specific political events that the Young Lords organized in these locations.

Founded in Chicago in September 1968, the Young Lords Organization later developed a chapter in New York City in July 1969 when various groups came together in the interest of neighborhood improvement and Puerto Rican self-determination. The New York chapter was led by a group of students and young people working together, including Felipe Luciano, Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman, Juan González, Juan “Fi” Ortiz, David Pérez and Miguel Melendez. Juan Gonzalez underscored the need to speak with the people of the neighborhood to begin their activist work: “We must go to them…to the masses. They may know something we don’t. So, first, we must go to the people of El Barrio.” Walking through the streets of East Harlem, the young group asked local residents about their biggest concerns in the neighborhood and the answer was nearly unanimous: garbage. The City’s Department of Sanitation rarely came to pick up garbage in East Harlem.

The Lords organized an accumulation of garbage at the center of Second and Third Avenues, near 106th, 111th, 116th and 118th Streets. Within a few days, the mayor’s special assistant came to visit El Barrio and sanitation trucks began making regular stops in East Harlem. Many more young people joined the cause and activism of the Young Lords including Luis Garden Acosta, Carlos Aponte, Connie Cruz, Jenny Figueroa, Gloria Rodriguez, Iris Morales, and Denise Oliver.

EXHIBITION OUTLINE

El Museo’s exhibition draws from works in the museum’s own collection including copies of the Young Lords weekly newspaper, Palante. It also explores the legacy of the Young Lords and the relationship between art and activism. Images by photographer Hiram Maristany that feature the Young Lords’ Garbage Offensive, their take over of the First Spanish Methodist Church of East Harlem (later renamed by the Young Lords as The People’s Church), their free morning breakfast program, the rerouting of a TB-testing truck and the funeral of Julio Roldán will all be highlighted in the exhibition.

Paintings and political prints (Antonio Martorell, Domingo García, and Marcos Dimas) from El Museo’s permanent collection will be on display. Works commissioned specifically for this exhibition by Coco Lopez, JC lenochan, Miguel Luciano, and Shellyne Rodriguez are also featured.

¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York will be exhibited at The Bronx Museum of the Arts (July 2 – October 15, 2015), El Museo del Barrio (July 22-December 12, 2015), and Loisaida Inc. (July 30 – October 10, 2015). The exhibition is co-organized by all three institutions.

At El Museo del Barrio the exhibition is made possible with Public Support from Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and the New York City Council.

RODRIGUEZ CALERO: Urban Martyrs and Latter Day Santos

El Museo del Barrio’s “Urban Martyrs and Latter-Day Santos” is the first museum survey of the Nuyorican artist Rodríguez Calero and the second in a series of five women-artist retrospectives in El Museo’s current five-year plan.

Rodríguez Calero forges her powerful and unique style from the richly varied traditions of her own background. Born in Puerto Rico and raised mainly in New York City, she received her artistic education at San Juan’s prestigious Escuela de Artes Plásticas and the famed Art Students League of New York. After living and studying abroad, in both France and Spain, she returned to New York where she became a participating artist in the historic Taller Boricua.

Availing herself of both classical and deeply contemporary elements including surrealist collage, Catholic iconography, medieval religious painting, and hip-hop street culture, Rodríguez Calero creates vibrant and multilayered canvases that defy easy categorization. Her work offers a masterful balance of the abstract and figurative, sacred and profane, the meditative and boldly graphic. Her unerring use of dazzling color might be the first thing that attracts us to a Rodríguez Calero work, but it’s her depth of thought, complex imagery, and humane, empathetic gaze on society that draw us ever deeper in, stopping us in our tracks.

EXHIBITION OUTLINE

Rodríguez Calero’s original technique is called “acrollage,” a technique of layering glazes of luminous colors with rice and other kinds of paper. The blending of fermenting surfaces and stenciled patterns attains lustrous color and texture. Guest-curated by Alejandro Anreus, the installation includes 29 large acrollage canvases, 19 smaller collages, 13 fotacrolés (altered photography) on canvas board, and 3 works of mixed media on paper. The exhibition will be accompanied by a brochure and a scholarly catalogue.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

A member of the same generation as Juan Sánchez and Pepón Osorio, and highly regarded by her fellow artists and many curators, Rodríguez Calero has not received the attention she deserves. El Museo is proud to address this omission by mounting the first museum survey of her work. Rodríguez Calero has also received awards, honors, and fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She was awarded residencies from The New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2006, she was featured in New Jersey Networks Public Television State of the Arts Series, “Sign Of The Times,” and in 2008-2009, she received the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in painting. She has exhibited in galleries and museums across the USA, in the Caribbean and China and her works are in many private and public collections.

CONCURRENT PROGRAMMING

As with every exhibition, El Museo will organize a series of public programs around “Urban Martyrs and Latter-Day Santos.” These programs include education activities for families and school children (art-making workshops, bilingual guided visits, storytelling), as well as program offerings for adult audiences (artist talks, panels, dance and music performances). A major concurrent event will be the summer festival, “Uptown Bounce: Summer Nights @ 104th & Fifth.” A free, three-week festival, carried out collaboratively by El Museo and the Museum of the City of New York, welcomes thousands of visitors, and hosts weekly musical performances, gallery talks, art-making workshops, and break-dancing demos.

CURATOR & ARTIST: A Conversation | To read, click here.

RODRIGUEZ CALERO: Urban Martyrs and Latter Day Santos is made possible thanks to the generous support from The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, series sponsor of El Museo del Barrio’s Women Artists Retrospective Series. With additional public support from the New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.

CUT N’ MIX: Contemporary Collage

This exhibition explores the work of artists experimenting with collage and collage techniques in ways that expand the gestures of cutting paper and mixing various mediums together. It takes as its point of departure some of the concepts from Dick Hebdidge’s series of essays collectively titled Cut N Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music, published in 1980. In this text, Hebdidge explored the variations of Caribbean reggae and dancehall and other related styles of music as emblematic markers of Caribbean ideas of nationhood, belonging, and the making of culture.

Hebdidge notes the following about additional versions of a song, a kind of sound collage that is made from the original melody: On the dub, the original tune is still recognizably there, but it is broken up. The rhythm might be slowed down slightly, a few snatches of song might be thrown in and then distorted with echo. (p. 83)

This idea of an original form of working (the paper collage) that has been changed in some way through more radical processes is addressed in various ways in this exhibition. So-called traditional collages are included, in which papers or photographs or prints or magazine images are placed over other layers of paper. In addition, more “extreme” versions of collage are featured, such as layered and burnt linoleum, overlaid cardboard and fabric, gigantic collaged works, and pop-style drawings collaged into digital videos.

The artists included in the exhibition range from established artists who are veterans of collage to new generations of artists experimenting with this malleable medium.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Elia Alba, Jesse Amado, Blanka Amezkua, Javier Barrera, Maria Berrio, Cecilia Biagini, Michael Paul Britto, José Camacho, Karlos Carcamo, Nat Castañeda, Gaby Collins-Fernandez, Matias Cuevas, Rafael Ferrer, Roger Gaitan, Carolina Gomez, Javier Ramirez/NADIE, Carlos Gutierrez Solana, Hector Madera, Glendalys Medina, Alex Nuñez, Catalina Parra, Carlos Rigau, Hernan Rivera Luque, Linda Vallejo, Rafael Vega and Eduardo Velázquez.

UNDER THE MEXICAN SKY: Gabriel Figueroa—Art and Film

From the early 1930s through the early 1980s, the Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa (1907–1997) helped forge an evocative and enduring image of Mexico. Among the most important cinematographers of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, Figueroa worked with leading directors from Mexico, the United States and Europe, traversing a wide range of genres while maintaining his distinctive and vivid visual style.

In the 1930s, Figueroa was part of a vibrant community of artists in many media, including Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, Edward Weston and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, who sought to convey the country’s transformation following the trauma of the Mexican Revolution. Later, he adapted his approach to the very different sensibilities of directors Luis Buñuel and John Huston, among others. Figueroa spoke of creating una imágen mexicana, a Mexican image. His films are an essential part of the network of appropriations, exchanges and reinterpretations that formed Mexican visual identity and visual culture in the mid-twentieth century and beyond.

The exhibition features film clips, paintings by Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, Manuel Rodriguez Lozano and José Chavez Morado, photographs, prints, posters and documents, many of which are drawn from Figueroa’s archive, the Televisa Foundation collection, the collections of the Museo de la Estampa and the Museo Nacional in Mexico. In addition, the exhibition includes work by other artists and filmmakers from the period such as Luis Buñuel, Sergei Eisenstein, Edward Weston, and Tina Modotti that draw from the vast inventory of distinctly Mexican imagery associated with Figueroa’s cinematography or were heavily influenced by his vision.

UNDER THE MEXICAN SKY: Gabriel Figueroa—Art and Film is a project by Televisa Foundation and CONACULTA. Corporate Benefactor is Metlife Foundation. Exhibition Benefactor is Tony Bechara. Public support from Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and the New York City Council. Additional support provided by the Circulo de Coleccionistas of El Museo del Barrio, the Mexico Tourism Board, the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York, and the Mex-Am Cultural Foundation, Inc.

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