Popular Painters and Other Visionaries
Popular Painters and Other Visionaries examines the practices of 35 artists working on the margins of modernism and the mainstream art world throughout the Americas around the mid-20th century. The exhibition creates new dialogues between Latino and Latin American artists, with an emphasis on the US, the Caribbean, and South America and the African diaspora in these regions. The term “popular” painters is used to identify artists that because of their class or racial backgrounds have been marginalized from official art history and labeled with pejorative terms such as naive and primitive.
First presented as a virtual exhibition during the months of the global pandemic, this new version of the show presented in the galleries will feature over 100 works, with more than half drawn from El Museo’s Permanent Collection. The checklist is supplemented with loans from other institutional collections, including The Museum of Modern Art and the American Folk Art Museum and Museu de Arte de São Paulo, as well as works from private holdings never presented before in New York.
The exhibition is grouped in four thematic sections. “Inside/Outside” explores the hybrid influence of European genre painting and popular culture in the work of Black Modernists such as Horace Pippin, Heitor dos Prazeres, and Micius Stéphane, among others. “Visible/Invisible” focus on the influence of spirituality and Afro-Atlantic religions, including paintings by Benoît Rigaud and Louisiane Saint Fleurant, works on paper by Minnie Evans and Consuelo González Amézcua, sculptures by Chico Tabibuia, and beadwork by Antoine Oleyant. “Public/Private” showcases the interest for vernacular architecture and the representation of communal landscapes, including a large group of serigraphs by Manuel Hernández Acevedo and in-depth presentations by Préfète Duffaut and Asilia Guillén. “Animal/Human” presents a mix of human and animal figurative works, focusing on Latinx pioneers such as Felipe Jesús Consalvos, Gregorio Marzán, and Eloy Blanco.
An accompanying scholarly, 200-page catalog will be published, including essays by the curators, reproduction of works in the exhibition, and commissioned close-reading short-essays on selected artworks.
Popular Painters & Other Visionaries is presented by the MetLife Foundation. Leadership support provided by Tony Bechara. Additional support provided by Isabel & Julio Nazario and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Raphael Montañez Ortiz — A Contextual Retrospective
El Museo del Barrio is pleased to present Raphael Montañez Ortiz: A Contextual Retrospective, the first large-scale exhibitionsince 1988 dedicated to the artist, activist, educator, and founder of El Museo del Barrio. Curated by El Museo’s chief curator, Rodrigo Moura, and guest curator Julieta González, the exhibition spans several decades of his production, from the 1950s to the early-2020s, in different media such as film, painting, photography, video installations, documents, and assemblages. This is the largest exhibition-to-date dedicated to the artist.
Raphael Montañez Ortiz is a central figure in U.S. Post-war art, whose pioneering practice began with trail-blazing experimental film works in 1957. In the 1960s, he was a key figure in the international Destruction Art movement, with performative actions that would result in powerful sculptures made from destroyed objects. His practice expands art historical references, from U.S. Abstract Expressionism and Dada to identity and his upbringing in a Puerto Rican family in New York. At the same time, his work was informed by an ongoing interest in psychoanalysis and anthropology, which resulted in his exploration of shamanic practices and the therapeutic and healing potential of art, parallel to his research into pre-Hispanic cultures. This is a constant concern that runs from the early destruction pieces such as the Archaeological Finds to his later performative actions and works addressing the Indigenous cultures of the Americas.
The exhibition is divided into four sections exploring the contributions of Montañez Ortiz to art of the 20th and 21st Centuries. These include Destruction, which focuses on his early films and assemblages and a large group of Archaeological Finds, with works from different American and European Museum collections seen together for the first time; Decolonization and Guerrilla Tactics, which addresses his Puerto Rican background and related activism, including his participation in the foundation of El Museo del Barrio and his engagement with other groups at the time, such as the Art Workers Coalition, the Guerrilla Art Action Group, the Taller Boricua, and the Judson Gallery; Ethnoaesthetics, referring to a term coined by him and dealing with forms of resistance to cultural ethnocentrism; and Physio-Psycho-Alchemy, which explores the core concept of his doctoral thesis and the works he made in this direction, where meditation, ritual, and breathing practices are at the center of a series of performative and participative works. In addition, the section presents his videos produced in the 1980s, where cutting and editing are employed to produce almost hypnotic effects.
Raphael Montañez Ortiz: A Contextual Retrospective is presented by Bank of America. Leadership support is provided by Tony Bechara. Major support is provided by the Terra Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Additional support is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA).
En Foco: The New York Puerto Rican Experience, 1973-1974
El Museo del Barrio presents En Foco: The New York Puerto Rican Experience, 1973–74. The exhibition centers on a single portfolio of 79 photographs by founding members of the Bronx-based collective, Charles Biasiny-Rivera, Roger Cabán, and Felipe Dante, who each focus on the themes of Education, Small Business, and Labor. The images offer a rich visual testament of New York’s Puerto Rican population, with community members photographing their own lived reality. Donated to El Museo del Barrio by En Foco in 1976, this exhibition marks the first time the portfolio is exhibited in full since 1979.
In addition to the complete selection of photographs, the show is supplemented with posters, exhibition catalogues, and other ephemera related to En Foco’s historical engagement with El Museo del Barrio.
En Foco: The New York Puerto Rican Experience, 1973–74 is made possible thanks to Tony Bechara, the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor, the New York State Legislature, and New York State Senator José M. Serrano. Additional support provided by The Nazario Family Fund. Special thanks to En Foco Inc.
Estamos Bien — La Trienal 20/21
Curated by El Museo’s Chief Curator Rodrigo Moura; Curator, Susanna V. Temkin; and Guest Curator, Elia Alba
El Museo del Barrio presents ESTAMOS BIEN – LA TRIENAL 20/21, the museum’s first national large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art featuring more than 40 artists from across the United States and Puerto Rico. Originally planned for Fall 2020, the show was reconceived and expanded as a yearlong initiative, later debuting in the summer of 2020 with online projects followed by an onsite exhibition in Las Galerías (Galleries) that opened in Spring 2021. Related public programs featuring curators, artists, invited scholars and other guests were held throughout the year.
ESTAMOS BIEN – LA TRIENAL 20/21 was inspired by the critically acclaimed and historic The (S) Files exhibitions held at El Museo between 1999 and 2013, which provided a platform for emerging Latino and Latin American artists from the New York metropolitan region. Reconceived as a Triennial, the exhibition for the first time has expanded its scope to a national scale including artists from California, Texas, Florida, Chicago, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, as well as from the Tristate Area. Utilizing an intersectional approach to Latinx identity, the Curatorial team has selected artists representing a diversity of generations, genders, ethnic, and racial backgrounds.
This first iteration of the triennial borrows its title, ESTAMOS BIEN, from the work of participating artist Candida Alvarez, a former member of El Museo’s curatorial team in the 1970s and the only artist in the show with a previous exhibition history with the institution. Her painting Estoy Bien (2017) takes its title from the resilient and obliquely sarcastic response to the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Now pluralized, the phrase resonates with the present-day moment, as the works in the exhibition address issues of race and identity politics, gentrification and displacement, climate change, as well as the particular effects of the global pandemic to Latinx and other BIPOC populations.
ABOUT LA TRIENAL CURATORS
Elia Alba is a multidisciplinary artist, who works in sculpture, photography and video. She has exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Smithsonian Museum of Art, Washington D.C.; Perez Art Museum Miami; National Museum of Art, Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the 10th Havana Biennial. Alba has received the Studio Museum in Harlem Artist-in Residence Program; the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and most recently the Anonymous Was A Woman award. A published author, her recent book, Elia Alba, The Supper Club, (Hirmer, June 2019), critically acclaimed by The New York Times and produced by the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, brought together artists, scholars and performers of diasporic cultures to examine race and culture in the United States through photography, food and dialogue.
Rodrigo Moura is a curator, writer and editor working in contemporary and modern art and currently serving as Chief Curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York. As the Adjunct Curator of Brazilian Art at Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand between 2016 and 2019, he curated and co-curated exhibitions such as Djanira: Picturing Brazil (2019), Melvin Edwards: Lynch Fragments (2018), Who’s afraid of Teresinha Soares? (2017), and Portinari Popular (2016). Prior to this, he was the Artistic Director of Instituto Inhotim (Minas Gerais, Brasil) between 2014 and 2015, where he also worked as a curator between 2004 and 2013. Independently, he has curated critically acclaimed exhibitions such as Time Kills: Moving Image from the Julia Stoscheck Collection (Sesc Paulista, 2019), Visiones de la tierra / El Mundo Planeado: Coleccion Luis Paulo Montenegro (Santander Art Room, Madrid, 2018), Mauro Restiffe: Album (Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2017), DOUBLES, DOBROS, PLIEGUES, PARES, TWINS, MITADES (The Warehouse, Dallas, 2017), artevida (several venues, Rio de Janeiro, 2014) and LINES (Hauser & Wirth Zurich, 2014), among several others.
Susanna V. Temkin is a Curator at El Museo del Barrio, where she most recently organized the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, Culture and the People: El Museo del Barrio, 1969-2019, drawing from objects from the Permanent Collection. Prior to this, she served as Assistant Curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres, Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin earned her master’s and PhD degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where her research concentrated on modern art in the Americas, with a focus on Cuba. She has published essays and reviews in the Rutgers Art Review, Burlington Magazine, and Hemispheres, and authored the chronology of Concrete Cuba: Cuba Geometric Abstraction from the 1950s, produced by David Zwirner Books.
ESTAMOS BIEN – LA TRIENAL 20/21 was made possible by The Jacques & Natasha Gelman Foundation. Leadership support is provided by The Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Commissioned works are made possible by Tony Bechara. Major funding is provided by Morgan Stanley and The Lenore G. Tawney Foundation. Generous funding is provided by The Cowles Charitable Trust and La Trienal Council: Craig Robins and Jackie Soffer, Estrellita and Daniel Brodsky and The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation. Additional support is provided by the El Museo Fund.
The Memorial… A Donation by Raphael Montañez Ortiz
Raphael Montañez Ortiz started a new large-scale work, in a development of a series of assemblages in which he had been working for the past decade. In the spring of 2020, he began to relate the work, inspired by the genocide of indigenous peoples during the European invasion of the Americas, to the impact caused by Covid-19 among Latinx and BIPOC populations in the United States. Last summer, Montañez Ortiz decided to donate the work to El Museo del Barrio, the institution he founded in 1969. The condition he put in place was that the work should be presented in 2020, in order to ensure its resonance in the context of the global pandemic. The work was completed after several months gathering material purchased online, presented in a specially created display case. This structure echoes the shape of various exhibition apparatuses and their colonial genealogies — from the cabinet of curiosities to the diorama and the reliquary. Inside are presented pages of books, replicas of gold nuggets, bones, feathers, and weapons, all alluding to the invasion of the Americas. The orchestration of these objects articulates recurring interests in the artist’s practice since the 1960s, such as colonialism, destruction, authentication, magic, and animism. Described in the artist’s own words “a personal prophecy”, he relates the piece to recent events as well as to his own mortality: “I put myself into this piece.”
With its monumental title (The Memorial to the Sadistic Holocaust Destruction of Millions of Our Ancient Arawak-Taino-Latinx Ancestors Begun in 1492 by Columbus and His Mission to With the Conquistadores Colonize and Deliver to Spain the Wealth of the New World no Matter the Human Cost to the New World’s Less Than Human Aborigine Inhabitants…), the work is presented here together with another item from El Museo’s permanent collection, an English edition of the book by Fr. Bartolome de las Casas. Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las indias was first published in 1552 and is one of the earliest and most important historical accounts documenting the brutal treatment of indigenous cultures by the Spanish conquerors.
This presentation anticipates the retrospective that will celebrate Montañez Ortiz’s more than sixty-year career, scheduled for the end of 2021. With this major donation, the founder of the Museum creates a gesture that expands and deepens his legacy in the institution.
An Emphasis on Resistance: 2019 CIFO Grants & Commissions Program Exhibition
In partnership with CIFO, El Museo del Barrio will host newly commissioned works of awardees: Emerging Artists – Susana Pilar Delahante, María José Machado, Claudia Martínez Garay, and Oscar Abraham Pabón; Mid-Career Artists – Leyla Cárdenas, Ana Linnemann, Yucef Merhi, and Nicolas Paris; and Achievement Award recipient – Cecilia Vicuña. An important catalyst for the presentation of new works and a meaningful platform for advanced research on Latinx and Latin American art, this collaboration between CIFO and El Museo del Barrio aims to consider the act of resistance in both Latin America and in its diaspora.
The annual Grants & Commissions Program, now in its 17th iteration and CIFO’s signature initiative, is an embodiment of the foundation’s mission to foster, support, and exhibit innovative work by Latin American artists. Nominated by an esteemed group of curators, the awarded artists exemplify the breadth and depth of contemporary art production throughout Latin America, engaging with diverse contemporary themes across media including video, performance, multimedia installation, sculpture, and found material, among others.
Taller Boricua: A Political Print Shop in New York
In celebration of Taller Boricua’s 50th anniversary, El Museo del Barrio presents Taller Boricua: A Political Print Shop in New York, the first monograph exhibition in three decades about the East Harlem-based Nuyorican collective workshop and alternative space. Best known for its cultural empowerment and political activism, the organization commonly known as ‘The Puerto Rican Workshop,” began as a printmaking studio, produced and circulated hundreds of prints by artists. The prints, produced mainly in the 1970s, centered on issues of Puerto Rican independence, workers’ rights, and anti-imperialism both locally and in the Caribbean and Latin America, issues that remain relevant today.
Curated by Rodrigo Moura, Chief Curator of El Museo del Barrio, the exhibition is comprised of more than 200 works and ephemera, including serigraphs, lithographs, linocuts, paintings, assemblages, collages, and drawings by founding and early members, including Marcos Dimas, Carlos Osorio (1927 – 1984), Jorge Soto Sánchez (1947 – 1987), Nitza Tufiño, and Rafael Tufiño (1922 – 2008), among several others. Works in the show draws from El Museo’s Permanent Collection, Taller’s extensive archives, as well as other collections.
A recognized space for political activism, Taller Boricua is one of several Puerto Rican organizations created in New York City around the same time, as the Young Lords and El Museo del Barrio, and has mentored several generations of artists, art historians, and curators. The space served as a focal point for the affirmation of identity as it relates to artistic production in the diaspora, as well as its connections with non-Western art history narratives. Focused on its first decade of existence, the exhibition also looks at the close relationship between Taller Boricua and El Museo del Barrio, examining their common members, ethos, and the artists’ role in the creation of a visual identity for the Museum’s programs and exhibitions in its early years.
Leadership support for this exhibition is provided by Tony Bechara. Generous funding is provided by The de la Cruz Martínez Family and Encarnita Valdes Quinlan and Robert C. Quinlan. Additional support is provided by Richard Torres.
Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla (I Am an Island)
Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla (I Am an Island) is the first museum retrospective of the prolific, innovative, and yet largely unknown artist Zilia Sánchez (b. 1926, Havana – lives and works in San Juan). The exhibition features over 40 works from the early 1950s to the present, including paintings, works on paper, shaped canvases, sculptural pieces, graphic illustrations, and ephemera. The retrospective traces Sánchez’s artistic journey from her early days in Cuba to her extended travels in Europe in the 1950s and residence in New York in the 1960s, and finally her move to Puerto Rico, where she has lived and worked since the early 1970s.
Learn more about Zilia’s artistic trajectory and full chronology >
Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla is accompanied by a major publication and newly commissioned artist’s documentary about her life and practice.
Organized by The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Curated by Dr. Vesela Sretenović, Phillips Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.
The presentation of Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla (I Am an Island) at El Museo del Barrio is supported by The Jacques & Natasha Gelman Foundation, series sponsor of El Museo del Barrio’s Women ’s Retrospective Series. With additional support from The Isabel and Agustín Coppel Collection, and Galerie Lelong & Co.
MI BARRIO: Memories of Home
In celebration of El Museo del Barrio’s 50th anniversary, we have partnered with Nuevayorkinos, a digital visual archive dedicated to New York City’s Latinx population. The collaboration aims to highlight the long-standing presence and cultural contributions of Latinx communities in our home of El Barrio (East Harlem). In the summer of 2019, we co-hosted a number of pop-up installations at El Museo and issued an open call, asking visitors to submit images and videos of Latinx life in El Barrio from 1969 to 2005.
We are delighted to present “#MIBARRIO: Memories of Home,” a family album that celebrates our personal and shared histories in this neighborhood. This installation reminds us of the importance of heritage and the many ways that Latinx people have enriched the cultural fabric of New York City. In the midst of our barrios and communities facing socio-economic changes and displacement, this collaboration is an important reminder of our roles as advocates and guardians of our culture. We exist and our histories matter.
Pa’lante!
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Para celebrar el 50 Aniversario del Museo del Barrio, nos hemos asociado con Nuevayorkinos, un archivo visual digital dedicado a la población Latinx de la ciudad de Nueva York. La colaboración tiene como objetivo destacar la presencia y las contribuciones culturales de las comunidades Latinx desde hace numerosas décadas en nuestro hogar El Barrio (East Harlem). En el verano 2019, organizamos varias instalaciones en El Museo y lanzamos una convocatoria abierta, pidiendo a los visitantes que enviaran fotos y videos de la vida latina en El Barrio desde 1969 hasta 2005.
Estamos encantados de presentar “#MIBARRIO: Memories of Home,” un álbum familiar que celebra nuestras historias personales y compartidas en este vecindario. Esta instalación nos recuerda la importancia del patrimonio y las muchas formas en que las personas Latinx han enriquecido el tejido cultural de la ciudad de Nueva York. En medio de nuestros barrios y comunidades que enfrentan cambios y desplazamientos socioeconómicos, esta colaboración es un importante recordatorio del rol que tenemos como defensores y guardianes de nuestra cultura. Existimos y nuestras historias importan.
Pa’lante!
Culture and the People: El Museo del Barrio, 1969-2019
In celebration of its 50th anniversary, El Museo del Barrio presents Culture and the People: El Museo del Barrio, 1969-2019, a two-part exhibition featuring selections from the Permanent Collection and a timeline contextualizing the history of the institution with related archival materials. The exhibition will reflect on the institution’s activist origins and pioneering role as a cultural and educational organization dedicated to presenting and preserving Latinx and Latin American art and culture. The exhibition borrows its title from an essay penned by one of the Museum’s founders and its first director Raphael Montañez Ortíz, who outlined his concept for the institution in a 1971 article published in Art in America.
In addition to the two part-exhibition Culture and the People, El Museo will initiate a cycle of exhibitions dedicated to the Museum’s Permanent Collection in 2020. The cycle will focus on specific works from the collection, including room-size installations and in-depth bodies of work, enabling El Museo’s curators to work directly with artists, scholars, and conservators to uncover new research and grant further public access to the Museum’s Permanent Collection.
PART I | Selections from the Permanent Collection
Organized in thematic sections, Culture and the People features selections from the Permanent Collection that explores the legacy of El Museo del Barrio through the concepts of Roots, Resistance, and Resilience.
In Roots, artworks will be presented that address El Museo’s formation within the social and political context of 1969, and its relationship with the artists and local community of El Barrio (East Harlem). This section will also take a more expansive perspective to cultural roots, through works that reference colonial and indigenous ancestries.
In direct response to the Museum’s activist origins, the section devoted to Resistance includes artworks related to protest, gestures of solidarity, dictatorship, and exile. Created in homage to national heroes and fallen martyrs, as well as commemorating specific events, these pieces address historical political grievances and relate to contemporary events such as the ongoing border crisis.
The final section, Resilience, recognizes El Museo’s ongoing commitment to its mission. In this section, works related to the construction and expression of self- identity will be displayed, alongside images that reflect a sometimes subversive or humorous method of survival. This section will culminate with a presentation of artworks that speak to personal and collective resilience, as well as the continuation of cultural traditions.
Each section will feature artists of diverse cultural backgrounds and generations, and will range from indigenous art and artifacts to contemporary paintings and installation art. A number of the pieces on view will relate to multiple sections, inviting audiences to recognize echoes and dialogues between the pieces on display. The exhibition will feature new acquisitions as well as artworks that have never been publicly presented, in addition to artworks familiar to El Museo audiences.
Featured Artists
ADÁL, Ignacio Aguirre, ASCO, Myrna Báez, Diógenes Ballester, Tony Bechara, Charles Biasiny-Rivera, Tania Bruguera, Ramón Cabán, Roger Cabán, Rodríguez Calero, Luis Camnitzer, Martín Chambi, Papo Colo, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Felipe Dante, Margarita Deida and Piedro Pietri, Ana de la Cueva, Milagros de la Torre, Perla de León, Bartolomé de las Casas, Marcos Dimas, Nicolás Dumit- Estévez, León Ferrari, Antonio Frasconi, Coco Fusco, Carlos Garaicoa, Domingo García, iliana emilia garcía, Arturo García Bustos, Flor Garduño, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Félix González-Torres, Muriel Hasbún, Pablo Helguera, Ester Hernández, Gilberto Hernández, Carmen Herrera, Lorenzo Homar, Graciela Iturbide, Alfredo Jaar, Ivelisse Jiménez, Charles Juhász-Alvarado, Shaun “El. C.” Leonardo, Richard A. Lou, Miguel Luciano, Antonio Maldonado, Carlos Marichal, Hiram Maristany, Antonio Martorell, Leopoldo Méndez, Héctor Méndez Caratini, Raphael Montañez Ortíz, Francisco Mora, Arnaldo Morales, José Morales, Rachelle Mozman, Isidoro Ocampo, Francisco Manuel Oller y Cestero, Pepón Osorio, Manuel “Neco” Otero, César Paternosto, Dulce Pinzón, Miguel Rio Branco, Rubén Rivera Aponte, Rafael Rivera-Rosa, Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, Félix Rodríguez Báez, Freddy Rodríguez, José A. Rosa Castellanos, Lotty Rosenfeld, Edgar Ruiz Zapata, Fernando Salicrup, Juan Sánchez, Jorge Soto Sánchez, Taíno Culture, Taller de Gráfica Popular, Rigoberto Torres, Rubén Torres-Llorca, Nitza Tufiño, Rafael Tufiño, Patssi Valdez, Vargas-Suárez Universal, Mariana Yampolsky, the Young Lords Party, and Alfredo Zalce.
PART II | An Institutional Timeline
Complementing the Permanent Collection, El Museo del Barrio presents a second display tracing the historical and cultural trajectory of the institution since 1969. Expanding on previous research about El Museo’s institutional past, the presentation reveals different moments in the Museum’s history as it relates to its leadership and staff, its various locations, and key exhibitions and programs throughout its first five decades. Archival documentation including photographs, posters, invitations, exhibition catalogues, and other ephemera will supplement a detailed timeline to further illustrate and contextualize critical moments in the museum’s history.