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
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.
Dreaming up North: Children on the Move Across the Americas
Dreaming up North: Children on the Move Across the Americas was 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 depicted 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.
FEARLESS LATIN/X AMÉRICA: SIDA+VIOLENCIA+ACCIÓN
FEARLESS LATIN/X AMÉRICA: SIDA+VIOLENCIA+ACCIÓN is organized by Visual AIDS & Residency Unlimited’s 2017 Curatorial Resident Eugenio Echeverría at El Museo del Barrio.
FEARLESS LATIN/X AMÉRICA: SIDA+VIOLENCIA+ACCIÓN will be on display on the People’s Wall at the entrance to El Museo del Barrio’s exhibition galleries April 29 through June 11, highlighting narratives relating to HIV/AIDS and Latinx América. FEARLESS LATINX AMÉRICA will feature dissident narratives from Chile, Cuba, Mexico and the United States, integrating text, artwork, photography and documents. The display will establish a critical chronological analysis considering how HIV/AIDS has been understood by hegemonic structures as a way of affecting traditionally outraged groups, out of a local and global perspective and a postcolonial approach.
Eugenio’s FEARLESS LATIN/X AMÉRICA: SIDA+VIOLENCIA+ACCIÓN presents itself in dialogue with Group Material’s well-known AIDS Timeline, originally displayed in 1989 at the Berkeley University Art Museum and recently reconsidered by former Group Material members Julie Ault and Doug Ashford, published for dOCUMENTA (13).
The range of materials in the FEARLESS LATIN/X AMÉRICA: SIDA+VIOLENCIA+ACCIÓN will include creative responses, public policy facts, reproductions of political speeches by public officials, media publications, scientific publications, statistic data, Latin-American literature, and artwork reproductions. Seeking a critical reading on the evolution of discourses around the culture of HIV/AIDS, the project will focus on three nodes: Identity as it relates to links within community; the institutionalization of systemic violence towards vulnerable communities through public policies, science and media; and dissident narratives correlating United States neocolonialism and the response from Latin-American countries to the HIV/AIDS crisis.
FEARLESS LATIN/X AMÉRICA: SIDA+VIOLENCIA+ACCIÓN is presented by Visual AIDS in collaboration with Residency Unlimited.
Eugenio Echeverría lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico, where he is the founder and director of Border Cultural Center. Since 2006, Border Cultural Center has coordinated over 100 interdisciplinary exhibitions and site-specific interventions. Highlights include QUEER UP! (DYKES, FAGS, WEIRDOS & YOU), a 12 month program of residencies, seminars, exhibitions and more considering LGBTQI identities, in collaboration with Laos Salazar; MULTIVERSO TRANS, a four day conference on trans identities conceptualized in collaboration with artists and trans activists focusing on violence, sex work, access to healthcare, legislative reforms and the autonomy of trans individuals, including LO QUE SE VE NO SE PREGUNTA, the first Mexican exhibition on trans identities, curated with Tania Pomar, Susana Vargas and Laos Salaza; and the upcoming project HACKING THE CITY, fostering discussion on civil disobedience in urban contexts, directed by Edith Medina.
BEATRIZ SANTIAGO MUÑOZ: A Universe of Fragile Mirrors
El Museo del Barrio announces the exhibition A Universe of Fragile Mirrors, a solo exhibition on the work of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz(b. 1972, San Juan, Puerto Rico; lives in San Juan). The exhibition is organized by the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and curated by María Elena Ortiz. Through a series of films and videos, A Universe of Fragile Mirrors captures the ironies of post-colonial conditions in the Caribbean—specifically in Haiti and Puerto Rico. Focusing on indigenous cosmologies, post-military spaces, and syncretic religions from the Caribbean, Santiago Muñoz borrows techniques from performance, film, visual ethnography, and anthropology, to document specific communities and public sites in order to generate her own bricolage -an alternative story about a popular Haitian market, or a newly discovered archeological site in Puerto Rico.
The exhibit will consist of films on continuous play, portraying Santiago Muñoz’s own interpretation of the realities in Haiti and Puerto Rico. Influenced by experimental cinema, she relies on observational research to generate non-linear narratives that challenge the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Santiago Muñoz’s characters are not professional actors, but instead everyday people who have direct experiences with the sites portrayed in her works. “The process is more experiential,”Santiago Muñoz explains. The result is a captivating piece representing daily events and life on the islands through an audiovisual language.Each video carries its own story and speaks to daily life and the traditional myths engrained in Caribbean culture.“Beatriz produces compelling images that provoke new interpretations on the realities of the Caribbean experience,” explains PAMM Curator María Elena Ortiz.
In addition, as part of the concurrent exhibition a glyph, a tool, an icon, El Museo has invited Santiago Muñoz to explore El Museo’s collection of over 8,000 objects and select a group of works that connect to her ideas, her films, her approach to making art and other real or symbolic affinities. Acting as curator, Santiago Muñoz has selected works from the permanent collection that include Hector Mendez-Caratini’s photographs of Taino petroglyphs, Ana Mendieta’s polaroids of her performance Body Tracks, a selection of destroyed film works by El Museo’s founder Raphael Montañez Ortiz, and works by Nuyorican artists including Marcos Dimas.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: A Universe of Fragile Mirrors is the third exhibition of El Museo’s five-year series highlighting Latina artists.
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: A Universe of Fragile Mirrors is organized by Pérez Art Museum Miami Assistant Curator, María Elena Ortiz.
The exhibition is made possible with major support from The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, Series Sponsor of El Museo del Barrio’s Women Artists series. Additional support from the New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito through the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Support for the exhibition catalogue provided by Galería Agustina Ferreyra.
New to You: Recent Acquisitions
This exhibition features new acquisitions from El Museo’s collection, none of which have been previously exhibited. New to You looks at a broad scope of works from the collection through the lens of fantasy and an exploration of the relationship between forms and contexts. Odd figures, strange creatures, unknowable landscapes and unusual points of view abound. Portraits are partly rendered or shown from an odd perspective, bodies become one with their backdrops or seem overwhelmed by their surroundings, and mysterious animals proliferate. Among a Thousand Treasures illustrates how objects selected from El Museo’s collection also participate in the creation of a visual feast that parallels the unusual, symbolic, subconscious and extravagant narratives celebrated in the literary history of the hemisphere. Pre-Columbian myths, surrealist tales, oral histories and the works of writers and poets all become important references for the interpretation of these works. Artists included in the exhibition are Julio Alpuy, Alberto Borea, Roberto Burle Marx, Catalina Chervin, Lissie Habié, Domingo Garcia, Hector Mendez-Caratini, Miguel Ocampo, Jose Clemente Orozco, Carlos Osorio, Cecilia Paredes, César Paternosto, Liliana Porter, Raquel Rabinovich, Miguel Río Branco, and German Tagle.
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.
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
Albers, Josef | Germany; Anuskiewicz, Richard | United States; Apollonio, Marina | Italy; Bechara, Tony | Puerto Rico; Biasi Alberto | Italy; Bill, Max | Switzerland; Boto, Martha | Argentina; Briel, Ernesto | Cuba; Carreño, Mario | Cuba; Clark, Lygia | Brazil; Contreras Brunet, Iván | Chile; Costigliolo, José Pedro | Uruguay; Cruz-Diez, Carlos | Venezuela; Darié, Sandú | Cuba (born in Romania); Espinosa, Manuel | Argentina; Fangor, Wojciech | Poland; Fiaminghi, Hermelindo | Brazil; Freire, María | Uruguay; García Rossi, Horacio | Argentina; GEGO (Gertrud Goldschmidt) | Venezuela; Gómez, Norberto | Argentina; Herrera, Carmen | Cuba; Hewitt, Karen | United States; Kosice, Gyula | Argentina; Lamis, Leroy | United States; Lauand, Judith | Brazil; Le Parc, Julio | Argentina; Llorens, Antonio | Uruguay; Mac Entyre, Eduardo | Argentina; Mavignier, Almir | Brazil; Negret, Edgar | Colombia; Oiticica, Hélio | Brazil; Otero, Alejandro | Venezuela; Palatnik, Abraham | Brazil; Pape, Lygia | Brazil; Pérez, Matilde | Chile; Rayo, Omar | Colombia; Riley, Bridget | England; Rodríguez, Freddy | Dominican Republic; Sacerdote, Ana | Argentina; Sánchez, Zilia | Cuba; Sanín, Fanny | Colombia; Soldevilla, Lolo | Cuba; Sosa, Antonieta | Venezuela (born in NY); Soto, Jesús Rafael | Venezuela; Stella, Frank | United States; Tadasky (Tadasuke Kuwayama) | Japan; Tomasello, Luis | Argentina; Vardanega, Gregorio | Argentina; Vasarely, Victor | Hungary; Vidal, Miguel Ángel | Argentina; Wilding, Ludwig | Germany; and Yvaral, Jean-Pierre, France.
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.
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.