LA BIENAL 2013: Here is Where We Jump!
This is the seventh edition of El Museo’s biennial exhibition. Under the title Here is Where We Jump!, La Bienal features work by artists, from newly-minted to mid-career, who live and work in the greater metropolitan area of New York City. La Bienal is a collective exhibition, a research project oriented towards a better understanding of the conditions under which artistic communities produce, present and think through art in our city. The artists’ methods and processes are of significance, as is the context in which they are interpreted. Every edition of El Museo’s Bienal explores, offers and supports experimental and experiential aspects of contemporary art, paying attention not only to current production but also to the way art absorbs from its past and influences its future. La Bienal can be read as an exercise in knowing how this process is constitutive of the history of contemporary American art. Here is Where We Jump is the title of this year‘s edition. This phrase refers to a quote from a fable by Aesop, The Braggart, in which a boast about a jump results in a challenge to repeat that particular feat: “jump here, jump now, here is where you jump.” The location in which the feat can be reenacted and the challenge resolved—here—becomes the important factor in the challenge. The artist becomes, at once, the producer and the receiver that reenacts a gesture of communication with the viewer.
In the course of the research the two curators of La Bienal 2013, Rocio Aranda-Alvarado and Raul Zamudio, began not only a process of studio visits, but also a collective conversation around questions:
on artistic production
on the different references that inform a work or a practice
on the roots, the individual and collective anchors that act as background and point of departure.
on how influences work, on the channels
on the nature of exchange among artists of different generations,
on the potential exchanges among artists
on the relationships between professionals, curators and art historians, and artists
on the different art worlds that constitute an artistic community,
on art and its economic life
on circulation
on knowledge
on reception
on listening and seeing
on spending time with artists
For full information on questions and artists’ responses and bios, click here.
THE COLOSSUS OF EAST HARLEM by Raul Zamudio
The title of the 2013 edition of El Museo Del Barrio’s La Bienal, Here is Where We Jump, is derived from the ancient Greek writer Aesop. Compelling, poetic, and open ended the paraphrase is culled from one of the author’s fables entitled The Braggart. The story entails a man who returns home from traveling abroad and boasts of defeating athletes in places as distant as Rhodes. What supports the braggart’s claim were the spectators of these competitions, and if they happened to be with him when proclaiming his victories they would verify these feats to be true. For full essay, click here.
JUMP HERE, JUMP NOW, OR DON’T TALK ABOUT IT, BE ABOUT IT by Rocio Aranda-Alvarado
El Museo del Barrio is a museum of American art. As proof, we offer this year’s Bienal 2013, which includes works from artists who were mostly born in the United States, including Puerto Rico. As part of organizing this exhibition, Raul Zamudio andI visited many, many studios throughout New York City, including some in Long Island and New Jersey. What has consistently been clear throughout the presentation of these biennial exhibitions of contemporary art by living artists is that there is both a variety and a wealth of ideas, of methods of working and production, of affinities and distinctions. For full essay, click here.
HERE IS WHERE WE JUMP by Chus Martinez
It is really difficult to use arguments to provide an account of a survey exhibition. Arguments normally revolve around questions posed by the curators or by the artists and these questions would help us to name notions and later somehow form a thesis on the subject matter of the show. Here, however, the subject matter is the exhibition itself: the fact that it exists as a confluence of artists who meet every two years at El Museo and exhibit work. La Bienal as an exhibition should be seen not asa result -even if it is the result of extensive research- but as a beginning. A beginning, a potential ”start“ that happens in the galleries every two years and serves toward the cause of visibility for an artist community located in and active in a city. For full essay, click here.
LA BIENAL 2013 PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
La Bienal featured work by artists, from newly-minted to mid-career, who live and work in the greater metropolitan area of New York City. Participating artists include Alejandro Guzman, Alex Nuñez, Becky Franco, Bernardo Navrro Tomas, Christopher Rivera, damali abrams, Edgar Serrano, Elan Jurado, Eric Ramos Guerrero, Ernest Burgos, Ernest Concepcion, Gabriela Salazar, Gabriela Scopazzi, Giandomencio Tonatiuh Pellizzi, Hector Arce-Espasas, Ignacion Gonzalez-Lang, Jonathas De Andrade, Julia San Martin, Kathleen Granados, Kenneth Rivero, Lucas Arruda, Manuel Vega, Matias Cuevas, Mel Xiloj, Miguel Cardenas, Pablo Jansana, Patricia Dominguez & Dominika Ksel, Paula Garcia, Pavel Acosta, Ramon Miranda Beltran, Risa Puno, Sara Jimenez & Kaitlynn Redell, and Sean Paul Gallegos. For additional information on the artists, including their bios and interviews, click here.
LA BIENAL 2013: Here is Where We Jump!‘s presenting sponsor is the Ford Foundation. Leadership support provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Major support provided by Tony Bechara. Media Sponsor is Remezcla. Additional support provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts and El Museo’s Collector Circle.
superreal: alternative realities in photography and video
EI Museo del Barrio presents superreal: alternative realities in photography and video, an exhibition of photography and video from 1980 to the present that explores the role of photographic mediums in presenting reality. These mediums conventionally assert the notion of reality and accuracy to viewers, but the works in this exhibition investigate the many layers that surround our traditional sense of the real. This exploration manifests through the artists’ creations of alternative realities, ones where the worlds of landscapes, human figures, architecture, objects, and natural phenomena are emphasized or subverted, revealed or obscured.
superreal features 70 works by artists such as ADAL, Tania Bruguera, Ana de la Cueva, Vik Muniz, Miguel Rio Branco, Betsabee Romero, Andres Serrano, and Teresa Serrano. These artists utilized their distinct working methods and viewpoints to challenge preconceived reality, and engage with their environments in both surreal and super-real ways that also subvert narrative forms.
The illusion of reality permeates in Las Hermanas Iglesias’, sisters Janelle and Lisa Iglesias, Nudes series. The artists wear knitted nude suits that mirror the same individual marks and scars on their own skin, and create self-portraits in dream-like environments of Tasmania. In Esteban Pastorino’s works, the photographer cloaks the pristine deco architecture of Francisco Salomone in a spooky darkness that hints to the history the facades conceal and mirror. Betsabee Romero transformed a 1955 Ford into an “Ayate car” to represent the experiences of Mexicans hoping for a better life in the United States.
The exterior floral patterning of the “Ayate car” and interior filled with dried roses goes beyond feminizing a traditionally masculine cultural icon by exposing the transitory and capricious nature of reality.
Caribbean: Crossroads of the World
The exhibition Caribbean: Crossroads of the World is the culmination of nearly a decade of collaborative research and scholarship organized by El Museo del Barrio in conjunction with the Queens Museum of Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Presenting work at the three museums and accompanied by an ambitious range of programs and events, Caribbean: Crossroads offers an unprecedented opportunity to explore the diverse and impactful cultural history of the Caribbean basin and its diaspora. More than 500 works of art spanning four centuries illuminate changing aesthetics and ideologies and provoke meaningful conversations about topics ranging from commerce and cultural hybridity to politics and pop culture.
Counterpoints reflects on the economic developments of the Caribbean, focusing on the shift from plantation systems and commodities such as sugar, tobacco, and banana to the energy and tourism industries, which have had tremendous aesthetic and social impact while proving to be a source of wealth and conflict. Patriot Acts studies the central role that creole culture and notions of hybridity, supported by newly empowered local economic forces, play in the configuration of national and regional discourses of identity, and how artists and intellectuals often pitted traditional, academic aesthetics against the “authentic,” indigenous and African heritages of the Caribbean.
Fluid Motions examines the complexities of the geographical and geopolitical realities of a region made up of islands and coastal areas, connected and separated by bodies of water, where human and natural forces collide, and commercial routes has often camouflaged foreign imperial ambitions. Kingdoms of this World considers the amazing variety of visual systems, languages, cultures and religions that co-exist in the Caribbean, and their role in the development of popular traditions such as syncretic religions, popular music genres, newly created languages, and the carnival.
Shades of History explores the significance of race and its relevance to the history and visual culture of the Caribbean, beginning with the pivotal moment of the Haitian Revolution in 1791. Race is analyzed as a trigger for discussions on human rights, social status, national identity, and beauty. Land of the Outlaw addresses the dual images of the Caribbean as a Utopian place of pleasure and a land of deviance and illicit activity, and how they intertwine in a myriad foundational myths and mediatic stereotypes (from pirates and zombies to dictators and drug smugglers) that are now part of global popular culture.
This landmark project has been over seven years in the making. Research visits and meetings with scholars from all over the Gran Caríbe region have been essential to establishing its scope and themes. The resulting intellectual exchange of culture, artistry, and vision will illuminate the Caribbean region like never before.
PROJECT TEAM
PROJECT DIRECTOR Elvis Fuentes, Curator of Special Projects for El Museo del Barrio
CURATORIAL TEAM Edward J. Sullivan, Helen Gould Sheppard Professor, Professor of Art History, lnstitute of Fine Arts, New York University Lowery Stokes Sims, Curator, Museum of Arts and Design, NY Gerald Alexis, Scholar of the lnstitut Canadien de Quebec, and former Minister of Culture in Haiti Yolanda Wood Pujols, Director of the Center for Caribbean Studies, Casa de las Americas, Havana, and Professor of Art History at the School of Arts and Letters, University of Havana.
INSTITUTIONAL CURATORS Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs and Exhibitions at El Museo del Barrio Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, Curator at El Museo del Barrio Hitomi lwasaki, Director of Exhibitions at the Queens Museum of Art Naima J. Keith, Assistant Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem
PUBLICATION
A major accompanying publication, Caribbean: Art at the Crossroads of the World, will serve as a resource for the study of early modern and contemporary Caribbean history, art, and culture. Edited by Deborah Cullen and Elvis Fuentes and co-published by Yale University Press, it features texts by leading scholars, curators, artists and public intellectuals. CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE: Gerald Alexis, Author of Haitian Painters, former Minister of Culture in Haiti Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, PhD, Curator, El Museo del Barrio Maryse Condé, PhD, Author and Professor Emeritus of French at Columbia University Deborah Cullen, PhD, Director of Curatorial Programs, El Museo del Barrio Elvis Fuentes, Associate Curator for Special Projects, El Museo del Barrio and Caribbean: Crossroads of the World Project Director Hitomi Iwasaki, Director of Exhibitions, Queens Museum of Art, with Herb Tam, Director of Exhibitions, Museum of Chinese in America Katherine Manthorne, PhD, Deputy Executive Officer and Professor, City University of New York Graduate Center Alvaro Medina, Art Historian and Curator, Institute of Aesthetic Research, National University of Colombia Veerle Poupeye, Director, National Gallery of Jamaica Sally and Richard Price, PhDs, Social anthropologists Sergio Ramírez Mercado, Writer, intellectual, and former Vice President of Nicaragua Jennifer Smit, Art Historian and curator, Curaçao; Lowery Stokes Sims, PhD, Curator, Museum of Arts and Design Edward J. Sullivan, PhD, Helen Gould Sheppard Professor, Professor of Art History, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University Krista Thompson, PhD, Associate Professor at University of Chicago Yolanda Wood Pujols, Director of the Center for Caribbean Studies, Casa de las Americas, Havana, and Professor of Art History at the School of Arts and Letters, University of Havana
Also included are texts by Alston Barrington Chevannes, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Ramón Emeterio Betances, David Boxer, Alejo Carpentier, Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, C.L.R. James, V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott.The publication is on sale at the gift shops of El Museo del Barrio, Queens Museum of Art, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.
SYMPOSIUM
In conjunction with the exhibition Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, El Museo del Barrio, the Queens Museum of Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem presented a three-day symposium bringing together scholars and practitioners from across the Caribbean and its diaspora.
Presenting Sponsor is MetLife Foundation. Leadership Support provided by FORD FOUNDATION. Major Support provided by The Reed Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Additional support is provided by the National Endowment of the Arts; Agnes Gund; Bacardi USA; Mondriaan Fund, Amsterdam; Christie’s, Inc.; Maduro & Curiel’s Bank N.V.; Tony Bechara; Ramón and Nercys Cernuda; The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation; Dr. Blas A. Reyes; Jacqueline L. Curiel; Susan R. Delvalle; Elena de Murias; Benjamin Ortiz; and Victor Torchia, Jr.
The exhibition publication is supported by The Dedalus Foundation and Patricia & Howard Farber Foundation. The exhibition and related programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency; Speaker Christine Quinn and the New York City Council; Institut Français; the Netherlands Cultural Services; and the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York.
NYC & Company is the lead media partner for this exhibition. Additional media sponsorship is provided by Cablevision; MTA NYC Transit; WABC-TV; and WXTV Univision 41. Special thanks to ARC Magazine; Art Experience: New York City; Bomb; Christie’s, Inc.; Flavorpill; and Urban Latino for their additional media support.
TESTIMONIOS: 100 Years of Popular Expression
El Museo del Barrio announced today that it is presenting TESTIMONIOS: 100 Years of Popular Expression in its galleries through May 6, 2012. The exhibition draws on rarely seen works by non-traditionally trained makers from El Museo del Barrio’s Permanent Collection and loans from the New York area. TESTIMONIOS bears witness to mankind’s artistic manifestations created under difficult circumstances or for spiritual or communal celebrations. This uplifting exhibition is organized by El Museo del Barrio and curated by Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs at the museum.
Testimonios: 100 Years of Popular Expression will feature works and artist projects by well-known and beloved self-taught artists such as the Puerto Rican sculptor, Gregorio Marzán (1906-1997) and the Mexican draftsman, Martín Ramírez (1895-1963), both of whose intense visions allowed them to forge highly personal and intricate works.
Projects undertaken by professional artists working with broader creative communities will be featured as well. Photographer Ejlat Feuer’s (b. 1950) documentation of the beauty, diversity, and cultural significance of casitas, small structures built in community gardens located in New York’s Puerto Rican neighborhoods, will be among those featured.
The exhibition is comprised of a vast range of artistic expression and purpose, including a large selection of santos de palo (small, carved, polychromed wooden saints created for domestic altars) from the Spanish Caribbean, evincing both continuity and innovation within the humble devotional form. Among other works, a range of Vodun banners (ornately sequined textiles created for the Afro-Haitian religion) is notable as a study in both syncretism and design. Audiences will have the opportunity to explore the rich visual language of paño (handkerchief) drawings, painstakingly elaborated by Mexican-American inmates in Texas to communicate their histories and hopes to their loved ones. Finally, the unique textile idiom of the Kuna (Panama and Colombia), crafted in colorful, layered molas, depicts their worldview.
El Museo’s galleries are divided as follows:
Casitas & Santos: Ejlat Feuer photographed community gardens in El Barrio, the Lower East Side, and the South Bronx, where Puerto Ricans and other community groups draw upon Caribbean agricultural and architectural traditions to transform vacant lots into garden sites with ‘casitas,’ or small houses, for community exchange and celebration. Featured alongside Feuer’s work, are santos de palo, or “saints made of wood,” primarily from Puerto Rico, representing holy figures and traditions of popular Catholicism that were used to convert native populations and African slaves. Many were also traditionally placed in household altars.
Vodun Banners & Madama Dolls: Practitioners of Vodun (the African word for “spirit”) honor a pantheon of spirits resembling Christian saints, called Loa, who led exceptional lives and are associated with particular powers or attributes. This gallery will also feature Madama Dolls previously owned by Dr. Manual Aulí, whose specialty was emergency trauma. The dolls facilitated communication with patients from other cultures. In Espiritismo (Spiritism), la madama is a spiritual assistant who functions as a protector and who maintains the African traditions in the culture and conveys messages to those seeking guidance. Sacred objects are often sewn inside these dolls to protect its owner and their family.
Molas & Marzán Sculptures: Mola refers to the decorative, hand-made panels in the blouses worn by Kuna women, as well as the entire garment that contains them. Originating from the tradition of Kuna women painting their bodies with geometrical designs, motifs include plants, animals, images from Kuna mythology and biblical scenes after the arrival of missionaries in the early 20th century. Also highlighted are the works of Gregorio Marzán, a self-taught artist who created a fantastical sculptural menagerie. After emigrating from Puerto Rico to New York in 1937, Marzán worked in bomb manufacturing but later became a “doll stuffer” at factories around the city. Marzán turned to art after retirement at age sixty-five using materials picked up in the neighborhood discount shops. “Nobody taught me, I made from the brain,” he once commented.
Paños: Paños are standard cotton handkerchiefs that are transformed into expressive, emotional works of art by correctional facility inmates that are sent as letters to loved ones. Their creators were artists or others who worked in artistic fields prior to their incarceration, many returning to art after their release. Wardens began banning the practice in the 1990s when gang imagery appeared. Paños frequently convey love and longing for family as well as personal journeys in life from crime to redemption.
Arpilleras & Margarita Cabrera: In Chile, on September 11, 1973, the freely elected government of Salvador Allende Gossens was overthrown by a violent coup, enacted by a military junta headed by Augusto Pinochet. The arpillera is one of the most potent art forms that flourished during this dark time. Arpilleras are small wall- hangings made from scraps of cloth attached to burlap food-sack backings that portray life under military rule, the desolate experiences of exile, and the search for “the disappeared.” Each arpillera helped ease isolation and fear of its female maker, often including pieces of clothing from missing loved ones. This tradition ended when democracy arrived in Chile in 1990 under Patricio Alwyn. Margarita Cabrera’s (b. 1973) workshops with female immigrants from Mexico resulted in the evocative works on display, as these women shared their stories of crossing the border by embroidering narratives on cactuses crafted from used U.S. border patrol uniforms.
EL MUSEO’S BIENAL: The (S) Files 2011 Takes to the Streets
El Museo del Barrio announced today that El Museo’s Bienal: The (S) Files 2011, its sixth biennial of the most innovative, cutting-edge art created by Latino, Caribbean, and Latin American artists currently working in the greater New York area, will take place June 14, 2011 – January 8, 2012. This year’s edition focuses on the aesthetics of the street and spreads all over the city, showcasing a record 75 emerging artists in seven different venues, including El Museo.
Since its first edition in 1999, The (S) Files has become a successful launching platform for a wide variety of talented Latino artists. Most recently, Allora & Calzadilla, featured in The (S) Files in 2000, have been selected to represent the U.S. at this year’s Venice Biennial. Additional notable alumni include Margarita Cabrera, Alejandro Cesarco, Pablo Helguera, Tamara Kostianovsky, Carlos Motta, and Iván Navarro.
It is in this context that this year’s biennial aims to expand the definition of contemporary Latino and Latin American art by taking on a broad exploration of the aesthetics, events, and visual energy of the street. The exhibition will feature works in all media, including murals and graffiti as well as non-traditional presentations in fashion and music. Among the themes developed in the exhibition are the influence of early New York street art movements, which were led by Latino artists; popular aesthetics and urban styles of the neo-baroque; and the creation of art works from urban debris.
In addition to its overall focus on New York-based artists every edition of the biennial includes a sidebar, which changes from year to year. The (S) Files 2011 will celebrate the Biennial of the Central American Isthmus (Bienal del Istmo Centroamericano) by showcasing the work of a group of artists featured in its most recent edition. Selected by Fuentes and Bermúdez, director of the Biennial of the Central American Isthmus, this selection highlights artists from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama, calling attention to Central America’s burgeoning contemporary art scene, which remains under- recognized despite its artists’ participation in global art movements.
Back after a four-year hiatus due to El Museo’s sprawling renovation, The (S) Files 2011 has grown to now include seventy five artists, a 50% increase over its previous edition in 2007 when it featured fifty one.
In order to represent this growth, to provide additional artists with the opportunity to show their creations, and to offer audiences from other areas of the city access to these art works, El Museo embarked on an ambitious collaboration with a group of organizations throughout the city, including BRIC Rotunda Gallery, chashama at the Donnell, Lehman College Art Gallery, Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Times Square Alliance. This reach is particularly important to El Museo as it reflects its institutional mandate to make Latino art and culture available to people of all backgrounds throughout the city.
While El Museo will exhibit a wide variety of works, the satellite venues will feature art objects grouped by specific themes and/or media. BRIC Rotunda Gallery will showcase video and photo documentation of performance art and other politically motivated works; chashama at the Donnell will feature works made of found objects, colored sand, crocheted plastic bags and glitter among other elements; Lehman College Art Gallery will focus on animation and illustration; Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance will show graffiti works and art objects made of recycled materials, Socrates Sculpture Park will present large scale works made of materials found in urban landscapes, and Times Square Alliance will display a selection of temporary interactive outdoor sculptures and installations on the street.
Artists featured here explore the landscape as a canvas and bring elements from the street into a conversation with an urban park. Found objects, colored sand, crocheted plastic bags and glitter are among the elements used to explore this relationship. For the artists, the city becomes like a catalogue and provides and endless supply of images and materials.
El Museo will produce a map/brochure including information about all venues, works, and artists featured at each location, as well as an illustrated catalogue including essays by Aranda-Alvarado, Bermudez, Fombella, and Fuentes.
The artists featured in The (S) Files 2011, whose backgrounds span almost every Latin American country, hail from multiple neighborhoods across New York City including Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx:
Marcos Agudelo (b. 1978, Bogotá, Colombia)
Sol Aramendi (b. 1968, Venado Tuerto, Argentina)
Firelei Báez (b. 1980, Santiago, Dominican Republic)
Base Collective (active since 2001)
Daniel Bejar (b. 1976, Bronx, New York)
Patricia Belli (b. 1964, Managua, Nicaragua)
Francisca Benítez (b. 1974, Santiago, Chile)
Juan Betancurth (b. 1972, Manizales, Colombia)
Alberto Borea (b. 1979, Lima, Peru)
Javier Bosques (b. 1985, San Juan, Puerto Rico)
Priscila de Carvalho (b. 1975, Curitiba, Brazil)
José Castrellón (b. 1980, Panama City, Panama)
COCO144 / Roberto Gualtieri (b. 1956, New York, New York)
Donna Conlon (b. 1966, Atlanta, Georgia)
COPE2 / Fernando Carlo Jr. (b. 1968, New York, New York)
Christian Curiel (b. 1977, Ponce, Puerto Rico)
Abigail DeVille (b. 1981, New York, New York)
Dister / Dister Rondon (b. 1979, New York, New York)
Ohne Titel / Flo Drake del Castillo (b. 1976, Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Alexis Duque (b. 1971, Medellín, Colombia)
Gerard Ellis (b. 1976, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic)
Feegz, Firo173 and Figaro / Carlos Jesús Martinez Dominguez (b. 1976, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina)
Felipe Galindo (b. 1957, Cuernavaca, Mexico)
Daniel González (b. 1963, Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Edwin González Ojeda (b. 1973, Brooklyn, New York)
Julio Granados (b. 1969, Lima, Peru)
Alicia Grullón (b. 1977, Bronx, New York)
Yasmín Hage (b. 1977, Ciudad de Guatemala, Guatemala)
Jonathan Harker (b. 1975, Quito, Ecuador)
Las Hermanas Iglesias (active since 2008)
Juan Hinojosa (b. 1980, New York)
Janelle Iglesias (b. 1980, Queens, New York)
Lisa Iglesias (b. 1979, Queens, New York)
INDIE184 / Soraya Marquez (b. 1980, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico)
Gisela Insuaste (b. 1975, New York, New York)
Jessica Kairé (b. 1980, Guatemala City, Guatemala)
Jayson Keeling (b. 1966, Brooklyn, New York)
Lady Pink / Sandra Fabara (b. 1964, Ambato, Ecuador)
Thessia Machado (b. 1967, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Sandra Mack Valencia (b. 1972 Medellín, Colombia)
Sofía Maldonado (b. 1984, San Juan, Puerto Rico)
J. Manuel Mansylla (b. 1978, Guatemala City, Guatemala)
Mare139 / Carlos Rodriguez (b.1965, New York, New York)
Armando Mariño (b. 1968, Santiago, Cuba)
Jessica Mein (b. 1975, São Paulo, Brazil)
Leonor Mendoza (b. 1965, Caracas, Venezuela)
Carlos N. Molina (b. 1959, Mayagüez, Puerto Rico)
Irvin Morazán (b. 1976, San Salvador, El Salvador)
Felix Morelo (b. 1971, New York, New York)
Mösco / Alvaro Alcocer (b. 1977, Mexico City, Mexico)
Rachelle Mozman (b. 1972, New York, New York)
Felipe Mujica (b. 1974, Santiago, Chile)
nikoykatiushka (NyK) (collaborating since 2003; b. 1978, Santiago, Chile; b. 1977, Suffern, New York)
Angel Otero (b. 1981, Santurce, Puerto Rico)
Geandy Pavón (b. 1974, Las Tunas, Cuba)
Antonia A. Perez (b. 1951, New York, New York)
Lina Puerta (b. 1969, Englewood, New Jersey)
Ronny Quevedo (b. 1981, Guayaquil, Ecuador)
Lee Quiñones (b. 1960, Ponce, Puerto Rico)
Hatuey Ramos-Fermín (b. 1978, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic)
Ishmael Randall-Weeks (b. 1976, Cuzco, Peru)
Justine Reyes (b. 1977, San Bernardino, California)
Ryan Roa (b. 1974, Tenafly, New Jersey)
Joaquín Rodríguez del Paso (b. 1961, Puebla, Mexico)
Rafael Sánchez (b. 1960, Havana, Cuba) and Kathleen White (b. 1960, Fall River, Massachusetts)
Rafael Sánchez (b. 1978, Newark, New Jersey)
Carlos Sandoval de León (b. 1975, Sabinas Hidalgo, Nuevo León, Mexico)
TOOFLY / Maria Castillo (b. 1977, Ibarra, Ecuador)
Johanna Unzueta (b. 1974, Santiago, Chile)
Rider Ureña (b. 1972 , Santiago, Dominican Republic)
VJ Demencia / René Juan de la Cruz (b. 1967, San Juan, Puerto Rico)
Adán Vallecillo (b. 1977, Danlí, El Paraíso, Honduras)
Simón Vega (b. 1972 San Salvador, El Salvador)
Elena Wen (b. 1980, Taipei, Taiwan)
Marela Zacarías (b. 1978, Mexico City, Mexico)
The (S) Files 2011 is made possible by The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust, Bloomberg, with additional support provided by The Greenwall Foundation and Ford Motor Company. El Museo del Barrio is also grateful for the support of The (S) Files Council, a cadre of collectors and art enthusiasts supporting emerging Latino artists.
LUIS CAMNITZER
El Museo del Barrio is proud to announce Luis Camnitzer, a traveling exhibition exploring five decades of work by the conceptual artist and writer Luis Camnitzer organized by Daros Latinamerica, Zurich, will be on view February 2 – May 29, 2011.
Curated by Hans-Michael Herzog, director of Daros Latinamerica, and Katrin Steffen, co- curator, this fascinating retrospective includes approximately 70 pieces dating from 1966 to the present, assembled from the Daros Latinamerica Collection. The exhibition is part of El Museo’s FOCOS series, which highlights mature, under-recognized artists.
A pioneer of conceptual art, Camnitzer takes a firm socio-political stance. At the heart of his work lies the idea that artists are not first creators of paintings or sculptures, but rather primarily ethical beings sifting right from wrong and just from unjust. He works in a variety of media—including installation, printmaking, drawing, and photography.
A fully illustrated catalogue in English and Spanish published by Hatje Cantz Verlag accompanies the exhibition. In addition to a conversation between Luis Camnitzer and Hans-Michael Herzog, the publication includes essays by Sabeth Buchmann, Antonio Eligio
Fernández (Tonel), Michael Glasmeier, Maren Welsch, and Camnitzer, along with a preface by Cullen.
ABOUT LUIS CAMNITZER
Luis Camnitzer was born in Germany in 1937, grew up in Montevideo, Uruguay and has lived and worked in New York since 1964. He received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1961 and 1982 and, has made his mark internationally not only as an artist but as a critic, educator and art theorist. Formally allied with the American Conceptualists of the 1960s and 1970s, over the past 50 years Camnitzer has developed an essentially autonomous oeuvre. Through his art Camnitzer often plays with the role of audience as silent witness and accomplice, within the arts as well as politics, often drawing on his youth in Montevideo under a repressive government that the international community allowed to persist.
Camnitzer studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, Universidad de Uruguay, and the Academy of Munich. Today he is a frequent contributor to the magazine ArtNexus. He is the author of New Art of Cuba (1994, 2003) and Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (2007). His visual works have appeared in numerous exhibitions, and are represented in the permanent collections of various international institutions including Tate Modern, MoMA, and El Museo del Barrio.
Retrospectives of his work have been presented at Lehman College Art Gallery in the Bronx (1991) and Kustshalle Kiel in Germany (2003). His work has appeared in biennials and group shows, including Information (1970), The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Biennial of Havana (1984, 1986, and 1991); Venice Biennale (1988); Whitney Biennial (2000); Documenta 11 (2002); Beyond Geometry (2005), Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and The New York Graphics Workshop (2008), Blanton Museum, University of Texas.
VOCES Y VISIONES: Signs, Systems & the City
Drawn from El Museo del Barrio’s wide-ranging Permanent Collection, this installation features works that deploy the pared-down building blocks of shape, color, and form. Humans have created visual representations that reduce elements in nature to essential forms, or create abstracted patterns, since our earliest record. Such ways of interpreting the world are widespread in both western and non-western societies to this day. These processes bespeak a desire to create an aesthetic of order, or, to make concrete concepts of cosmological patterns.
El Museo del Barrio’s collection includes many instances in which abstraction is an important, if not the prevalent, form of language. This includes works created by artists within traditional societies, such as the Taíno, Kuna, and Shibipo, as well as works created by artists trained in industrial centers, that demonstrate the vitality of abstract languages in communicating an urban sensibility. A spectrum of approaches is represented. These include geometric and perceptual explorations of color and shape, process-oriented works, and intensely personal and psychological responses. By the late 1960s, a generation of artists challenged the representational quality of art itself. At the core of their concerns were the very processes of “abstraction” and “representation”. Contemporary conceptual works attest to this important tendency.
Nueva York (1613-1945)
In an unprecedented collaboration, the New-York Historical Society and El Museo del Barrio will present Nueva York (1613-1945), the first museum exhibition to explore how New York’s long and deep involvement with Spain and Latin America has affected virtually every aspect of the city’s development, from commerce, manufacturing and transportation to communications, entertainment and the arts.
Organized by the two institutions, Nueva York will be on view from September 17, 2010, through January 9, 2011, at El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue (at 104th Street), while the New-York Historical Society’s landmark building on Central Park West undergoes a $60 million architectural renovation. The project team has been directed by chief curator Marci Reaven of City Lore and chief historian Mike Wallace, Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York and Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of Gotham.
Bringing together the resources of New York’s oldest museum and its leading Latino cultural institution, this exhibition will span more than three centuries of history: from the founding of New Amsterdam in the 1600s as a foothold against the Spanish empire to the present day, as represented by a specially commissioned documentary by award-winning filmmaker Ric Burns.
Nueva York will bring this story to life with hands-on interactive displays, listening stations, video experiences and some 200 rare and historic maps, letters, broadsides, paintings, drawings and other objects drawn from the collections of the two museums, as well as from many other distinguished institutions and private collections.
Among the experiences offered in the exhibition’s galleries will be:
• maps and interactives showing the vast networks of the Atlantic world in the 17th century, with its competing Spanish, Dutch, English and French shipping routes and colonial harbors;
• tools and artifacts of the trade between New York and South America, including a clipper ship model, navigation instruments, silverware, powder horns and slave shackles;
• paintings and books by New York artists and writers such as Washington Irving, Frederic Church and William Merritt Chase, who were deeply affected by their travels in Spain and South America;
• Spanish-language newspapers and books published in New York in the 19th century, and Spanish-language guidebooks to the New York of that period;
• military uniforms, political documents, paintings including a portrait of McKinley by Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller, and propaganda posters reflecting years of Latin American political struggles and U.S. interventions;
• an interactive listening station, allowing visitors to sample the Latin music of New York;
• artworks by modern Latin American artists including Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and Joaquín Torres-García, reflecting their images of New York;
• and From here to there / De aquí pa’llá (La guagua aérea), an art installation by Antonio Martorell (based on La guaga aérea / The Air Bus, by Luis Rafael Sánchez) showing Ric Burns’s specially commissioned documentary that tells the stories of Latino New Yorkers from 1945 to the present.
PLAN OF THE EXHIBITION
Visitors to Nueva York will trace the exhibition’s story through a series of five galleries, each dedicated to a particular theme and time period.
The first gallery, on the theme of Empires and Revolutions, begins in the 1620s, when New York (as first a Dutch and then an English town) exhibited extreme animosity toward Spaniards and Catholics and made it a point to exclude them (with certain notable exceptions, such as Sephardic Jews). Displays of these early years will include baptismal and court documents newly discovered by the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute on Juan Rodriguez, a black or mulatto Spanish-speaking sailor from Santo Domingo who is the first non-Native ever recorded as residing in the area of New York Harbor, and thus the first immigrant in New York’s history.
The gallery then shows how the situation changed with the American Revolution, when Spain became an ally and the first small Spanish colony was established in New York, along with the first above-ground Catholic church, St. Peter’s (built with aid from Spain and Mexico). Displays will testify to the wealth of the Spanish empire and to the taste for luxury goods in New York’s rising middle class. This gallery concludes in 1825, by which time New York had established a booming trade with Cuba, Puerto Rico and the newly independent countries of South America (whose liberation struggles were occasionally helped by Gotham). New York was now a critical link between the U.S. and Spain on the one hand, and between the U.S. and Spain’s former empire (and its remaining Caribbean possessions) on the other.
The second gallery, focusing on Trade, shows how the Port of New York in the years 1825-1898 was the place where U.S. flour and manufactured goods flowed south to Latin America, and Latin American and Caribbean products such as sugar, coffee, hides and silver flowed north into the U.S. The flourishing of this trade was the source of the economic and political fortunes of some of New York City’s most famous names, such as Havemeyer and Grace, as well as the basis of the development of Spanish and Cuban and Puerto Rican communities. One display in the gallery will explore the involvement of both New Yorkers and Cubans in sugar refining in New York. (Cuba sold some 80 percent of its annual sugar production to the United States through New York City.) Another will tell the story of William R. Grace, who founded his merchant steamship line in Peru, subsequently relocated the headquarters of his international trading company to New York and eventually was elected Mayor for two terms.
The third gallery, on Cultural Encounters, shows how New York, as the principal U.S. hub of communications and shipping, fostered not only commercial and political connections but also new cultural interactions. The old, negative views of New Yorkers and other North Americans about “the Spanish character” began to change, as Washington Irving made Christopher Columbus and the Spanish crown into central figures in the story of America’s origins, and William Merritt Chase turned Diego Velázquez into a model for American painters. New views developed during these years also led to stereotypes: Spain became picturesque, quaint and exotic; whereas South America began to appear in North American eyes as a lush, open opportunity for the dynamic U.S. The highly popular landscape paintings of Frederic Edwin Church thrilled New Yorkers, who began to take a great interest in the vast unknown lands to the South. North American voyagers, taking advantage of the new ease of steamship travel, returned to New York with exotic products—birds of paradise and beetle carapaces became sought-after fashion accessories—and with souvenirs of ancient indigenous cultures. Meanwhile, political turmoil and economic interests were pushing more and more Latinos into New York City.
Cubans especially flowed into New York as exiles during the long battle for independence from Spain; but poets, educators and politicians from Mexico to Argentina also came to do business, publish or get an education without crossing the Atlantic. They sent their impressions of New York’s social life and U.S. institutions to their compatriots, influencing their views; and they also exerted an influence of their own on New York, in sports, religion, architecture, engineering, business and the arts. As a special case study in cultural encounters, this gallery will include a display about Esteban Bellán, a Cuban who came to New York in the 1860s to study at Fordham University, became the first Latin American to play major league baseball and then helped to establish baseball in Cuba following his return in 1874.
The fourth gallery, on Political Encounters, details how New York’s ties to the Caribbean gave the city a special role in the colonial rebellions against Spain throughout the 1800s. The city offered economic and political refuge to thousands escaping repression and turmoil, and provided a staging ground for Caribbean activists to form governments in exile, publish their newspapers and direct insurrection at home. The gallery follows this story from May 1850, when The Sun newspaper hoisted a Cuban flag from its building at Nassau and Fulton Streets to hail Narciso López’s attempted liberation of Cuba from Spain, through the decisive intervention of the U.S. in the Cuban Spanish-American War of 1898: a conflict sold to the American public by New York newspaper publishers including Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, and fought most famously on the American side by New Yorker Theodore Roosevelt. In the aftermath of the war, which made Puerto Rico a U.S. territory and established a legalized U.S. role in Cuba’s internal affairs, New York City became the capital of a new American empire, and a magnet for millions of immigrants who arrived in the early decades of the 20th century.
The fifth and final gallery, Landscape of Nueva York, maps the neighborhoods, factories, dance halls, clubs, museums, churches and political offices that provided the sites for encounters among Latinos and with non-Latinos in the 20th century, as New York City filled with people from the Spanish-speaking world. Displays will illustrate the development of Little Spain around 14th Street (circa 1910) and then of El Barrio in East Harlem; the entry of Latinos into New York’s garment industry and its unions; the role of New York’s Spanish-speaking community in supporting the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War and bonding with other anti-fascist forces; and the ever-increasing artistic and cultural exchange between Latin America and New York, as seen in major New York institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art (with Mexican muralists and other Latin American artists) or the music industry (with tango, salsa and rumba).
RELATED PUBLICATION
The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-color catalogue titled Nueva York: New York and the Spanish-Speaking World, edited by Edward J. Sullivan, the Helen Gould Sheppard Professor of the History of Art, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. The catalogue will feature illustrated essays by ten noted scholars: exhibition Chief Historian Mike Wallace; Carmen Boullosa (City College of New York); James Fernández (NYU); Juan Flores (NYU); Anna Indych-Lopez (City College of New York); Richard Kagan (Johns Hopkins University); Katherine Manthorne (CUNY Graduate Center); Cathy Matson (University of Delaware); Lisandro Pérez (Florida International University); and Virginia Sánchez Korrol (Professor Emerita, Brooklyn College).
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
An extensive series of public programs, including lectures, conversations, film screenings, musical performances and walking tours of the city will complement the exhibition and feature some of the nation’s top historians, authors, and curators as well as Latino baseball and boxing greats, Broadway performers and musical artists. Educational programs will range from docent- led tours and a brochure for family visits produced by El Diario La Prensa, the oldest Spanish – language newspaper in United States, to professional development programs for teachers and a full array of standards-based curriculum materials. An interactive exhibition website will provide access to exhibition themes and scholarship and a variety of links to audiovisual materials. Nueva York public programs are generously supported by American Express.
CURATORIAL TEAM
The Guest Curator for Nueva York is Marci Reaven of City Lore, an organization dedicated to presenting programs about New York’s cultural heritage. Kathleen Hulser, Curator, N-YHS, and Elvis Fuentes, Curator, El Museo del Barrio, also served as advisors.
Advisors to the curatorial team for Nueva York include Carmen Boullosa (City College); Emilio Cueto (formerly of the Inter-American Development Bank, Washington, DC); Arcadio Díaz- Quiñones (Princeton University); James D. Fernández (NYU); Juan Flores (NYU); Juan González; Gabriel Haslip-Viera (City College); Ramona Hernández (Dominican Studies Institute); Claudio Iván Remeseira (Columbia University); Miriam Jiménez-Román; Richard Kagan (Johns Hopkins University); Enrique López Mesa (Center for Martí Studies in Havana); Cathy Matson (University of Delaware); Lisandro Pérez (Florida International University); Virginia Sánchez Korrol (Professor Emerita, Brooklyn College); Robert Smith (Baruch College); Doris Sommer (Harvard University); Ilan Stavans (Amherst College); Edward Sullivan (NYU); Silvio Torres-Saillant (Syracuse University); and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto.
The galleries have been designed by exhibition consultants Esposito Design Studio.
Lead sponsorship for Nueva York is provided by Cablevision’s Optimum family of products. Nueva York is organized with support from The Rockefeller Foundation’s New York City Cultural Innovation Fund. Public programs for Nueva York are made possible with generous support from American Express. Nueva York is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency. Additional support is provided by the Ford Foundation, Goldman Sachs, Con Edison, the New York Council for the Humanities and Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.
RETRO/ACTIVE: The Work of Rafael Ferrer
El Museo del Barrio is proud to announce that Retro/Active: The Work of Rafael Ferrer, the first solo exhibition in a museum to examine the breadth and depth of the artist’s influential production over the last 55 years, will be on view June 8 – August 22, 2010. The traveling retrospective, curated by Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs at El Museo del Barrio, includes approximately 100 works from the mid-1950s to the present in a vast variety of media including collage, sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, and mixed-media. It is part of El Museo’s FOCOS series, which highlights the work of mature, under recognized, and groundbreaking artists.
A fully illustrated, bilingual exhibition catalogue, with entries covering various thematic aspects of the artist’s work by guest authors, as well as chronology, accompanies the exhibition. Included in the catalogue is an introduction by Zugazagoitia; an introductory overview by Cullen; as well as essays by Edward Sullivan, Vincent Katz, and Carter Ratcliff. The retrospective will be augmented by a forthcoming biographical monograph on Rafael Ferrer, authored by Cullen for the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center as part of the A Ver: Revisioning Art History series.
ABOUT RAFAEL FERRER
Rafael Ferrer was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1933, and from an early age was exposed to international groups and artists in Puerto Rico, New York, and Los Angeles. He attended Syracuse University where he focused on playing jazz timbales. Upon his return to the island in 1953, he studied painting with the exiled Spanish surrealist, Eugenio Fernández Granell, at the Universidad de Puerto Rico. Ferrer joined Granell in Europe during the summer of 1954, where he met Wifredo Lam, as well as André Breton, Benjamin Peret, and other renowned artists associated with the Surrealist movement. This trip would have great influence and long lasting impact on his oeuvre.
After notorious and critically-excoriated exhibitions of collaged paintings, environments, and welded steel combines in Puerto Rico during the early and mid1960s, Ferrer moved to Philadelphia in 1966. The artist began to carry out ephemeral “actions” and to create improvisational sculpture with chain link fencing, corrugated steel, neon tubing, leaves, ice, hay, and grease. Ferrer became internationally recognized between 1969 and 1971 for his participation in seminal “postminimalist” exhibitions, including: Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969); Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, WorksConcepts-Processes-Situations-Information (Bern Kunsthalle, 1969); and Information (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970). His 1968 and 1970 exhibitions at Leo Castelli’s Warehouse, 1969 and 1970 solo exhibitions in Essen and Amsterdam, and his Deflected Fountain as part of a 1970 Duchamp homage at the Philadelphia Museum of Art sealed his reputation within the avant-garde. His attempts to bring the New York avant-garde to the island were again, critically misunderstood and his relationship with his birthplace continued to be fraught.
During the early 1970s, Ferrer began creating room-sized installations that were more poetic, literary, and allusive. Building off his earlier use of natural and industrial materials he continued to incorporate ephemeral elements in his work such as found objects, neon and either painted or printed imagery. Madagascar (Pasadena, 1972); Museo (MCA Chicago, 1972); Deseo (Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, 1973); and Isla (MoMA-Project Room, 1974) all stem from this period. While Ferrer had previously been colleagues of artists such as Robert Morris, Yvonne Rainer, and Alan Saret, his travels introduced him to other groups that were to have a direct impact on his subsequent work. He became friendly with Claes Oldenberg, the Chicago imagists including Roger Brown, and several of the American “New Image Painters,” including Neil Jenney and Alex Katz.
Ferrer developed various long-standing series in the 1970s. In this period, he received several NEA Fellowships and a Guggenheim Foundation Grant. Nonetheless, through his change of format, his work began to be positioned outside of the cutting-edge, and pigeonholed within several “Latin American” projects as well as along “primitivist” and “intuitive” lines. His ongoing series included Maps (approximately 100 drawings on printed maps and navigational charts); Faces (over 500 visages drawn on paper bags of various sizes); Kayaks and Constructions (assembled and painted, often hanging, sculptures). In the mid 1970s, Ferrer began creating intimate and magically-named Tents, with painted sides and often with a crowning word over the portal.
He was excited to observe Katz painting from life while vacationing in Puerto Rico, and soon he returned to painting. In 1980, Ferrer began his nearly 20-year engagement with large-scale Painting (1980-1997), incorporating portraits, nudes, musicians, nightclub and cockfight scenes, landscapes, and scenes in the Dominican Republic where he lived and worked part-time. He also produced homages to various artists, including Wilfredo Lam, David Smith, Alberto Giacometti, and Giorgio Morandi.
Despite the fact that Ferrer remained consistently engaged with, and responsive to, the changing trends of the larger art world around him, his involvement with largescale painting has never been considered alongside American “New Image Painting” or Italian transavanguardia or German Neo-Expressionism. His entire body of work after 1980 has never been critically recognized or examined together with his earlier, better-known production. This retrospective will, for the first time, note the continuities of Ferrer’s interests and themes over his lifetime.
During his long career, Ferrer has created artist’s books, fine prints, and has had major public art commissions in the Bronx (1979), Philadelphia (1982), and Puerto Rico (2004). Currently, his smaller-scale work involves drawing, collage and mixed-media on paper and canvas, and engages language, topical news, and artistic events culled from newspapers and magazines to express his sharply critical, witty observations.
Rafael Ferrer’s work has been acquired by prominent private and public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, yet his contributions remain outside of U.S. or western art histories, as well as the standard histories of Puerto Rican and Latino contemporary art. Credits Lead sponsorship support for Retro/Active, The Work of Rafael Ferrer is generously provided by JP Morgan. Additional major support has been provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
PHANTOM SIGHTINGS: Art After the Chicano Movement
El Museo del Barrio announced today that it will present Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement at its newly renovated galleries March 24 – May 9, 2010. The first major museum exhibition exploring the legacy of Chicano art in the United States in nearly two decades, this internationally traveling showcase is organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Chicano Studies Research Center of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and curated by Rita Gonzalez and Howard Fox of LACMA and Chon Noriega of the Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA.
Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement will feature over 100 works in a wide variety of media by thirty artists including: Scoli Acosta, Margarita Cabrera, Juan Capistran, Sandra de la Loza, Alejandro Diaz, Nicóla Lopez, Harry Gamboa Jr., Patssi Valdez, Gronk (Glugio Gronk Nicandro), Carolyn Castaño, Adrian Esparza, Victor Estrada, Carlee Fernandez, Christina Fernandez, Gary Garay, Ken Gonzalez-Day, Danny Jauregui, Jim Mendiola, Delilah Montoya, Julio César Morales, Ruben Ochoa, Eamon Ore-Giron, Cruz Ortiz, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, Marco Rios, Arturo Romo, Shizu Salamando, Eduardo Sarabia, Jason Villegas, and Mario Ybarra Jr. The vast array of media ranges from paintings, sculpture, installation, video, performance, and photo-based art, and intermedia works that incorporate film, digital imagery, and sound—a number of them newly commissioned for the show. This presentation is accompanied by a 240-page catalogue featuring principle essays by the exhibition’s curators, individual artist entries, and a quasi-satiric “alternative” chronology of Chicano history by exhibition artist Rubén Ortiz-Torres and filmmaker Jim Mendiola.
As the exhibition’s title, inspired by artist and commentator Harry Gamboa Jr., suggests, Chicanos have historically constituted a “phantom culture” within American society—largely unperceived, unrecognized, and un-credited by the mainstream. In contrast, Chicano art was established as a politically and culturally inspired movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s, stressing ethnic pride and political empowerment.
The exhibition is atypical when considered among exhibitions of Chicano art that have preceded it in that it moves away from efforts to define a distinct identity or style and instead focuses attention on conceptual strategies that artists use to intervene in public spaces or debates. Phantom Sightings traces these tendencies to the late 1960s, adding a new dimension to our understanding of Chicano art history and notions of ethnic identity, cultural politics, and artistic practice. While attentive to this historical context, Phantom Sightings places an emphasis on a newer generation of emerging artists from across the United States, many who do not work under the label of “Chicano art.” These artists engage local and global politics, mix high and low cultures, and sample legitimate and bootlegged sources, all within a conceptual framework.
Although Chicano art was primarily represented by the traditions of painting, muralism, and graphic arts, there has always existed a simultaneous, if less historicized, experimental, and conceptual tendency whose art forms encompass performance, video, photography, film, and unsanctioned “guerilla” interventions into daily urban activity. This direction has proved to be of particular interest to many Chicano artists coming of age in the 1990s and beyond.
Phantom Sightings seeks to explore the ways in which these contemporary artists situate their work at the crossroads of local struggles over urban space, transnational flows of culture, and global art practices. Some artists’ work functions as an intervention that “haunts” public spaces with evidence of other, sometimes hidden, meanings and agendas.
Sandra de la Loza (Los Angeles) engages publicly dedicated sites, such as the Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial in downtown Los Angeles, conceptually “rededicating” it in a video projection in which the terra cotta figures of the frieze are animated so that they relate a more complete—perhaps less idealized— account of the very history the monument commemorates.
Alejandro Diaz (New York), dressed in a white suit and looking like the perfect dandy, stood by the front door of Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue selling handscrawled cardboard signs with messages such as “Mexican wallpaper” or “Looking for Upper East side Lady with nice clean apt. (must have cable).”
Eduardo Sarabia’s (Berlin and Guadalajara, Mexico) Treasure Room, echoing the idea that treasures are never buried near their place of origin, touches on transcontinental relationships and valuable goods imports as well as the signifying weight they carry.
Other artists, whose work is more studio-based, repurpose and transform familiar objects or artistic styles into unexpected new ones, often with provocative effect. These artists explore the intersection of divergent experiences, perceptions, traditions, and value systems.
Margarita Cabrera’s (El Paso) Vocho, created just one year after the last VW Beetle was manufactured in Mexico (July, 2003), celebrates and pays tribute to this iconic automobile while simultaneously serving as a symbol for the disjunction and dislocation that is inherent to the physical and emotional process of migration.
In The Breaks (2000), Juan Capistran (Los Angeles) made photographs of himself break dancing on what appears to be a Carl Andre minimalist floor sculpture, subsuming the object’s “high art” pedigree to Capistran’s own engagement of a vernacular art form.
Nicola López (New York) engages in a conversation about the ways in which technology’s exponential growth has acted like kudzu on the ecosystem of human society. Her background in anthropology drives her to excavate the basic infrastructures that compose modern life. Her work has been described by a critic as “orgiastic chaos,” with exploding installations that stretch from floor to wall to ceiling.
Another prominent strategy among the artists in the show involves the creation of improbable hybrids or objects whose identity is forever shifting and in flux, drawing upon diverse, sometimes divergent, cultural sources.
Rubén Ortiz-Torres’s (Los Angeles) high-finish paintings made with Kameleon Kolors TM—an iridescent paint popular among custom car enthusiasts—actually appear to change color as the viewer moves by them; his camouflage paintings continue the theme of uncertain or indeterminate identity.
Prior to Phantom Sightings’ showing at El Museo del Barrio, it premiered at LACMA from April 6 – Sept 1, 2008, and went on to appear at Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, from October 16, 2008 – January 11, 2009; The Museo Alameda, San Antonio, Texas, March 13 – June 14, 2009; the Phoenix Art Museum, July 10 – September 20, 2009; and Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Guadalajara, Mexico, November 25, 2009 – January 31, 2010.
This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Leadership support for the presentation of Phantom Sightings at El Museo was provided by the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust. Additional support has been provided by The Rockefeller Foundation.