El Museo del Barrio is New York’s leading Latino cultural institution.
Last week, as part of its reopening, the Fifth Avenue museum straddling the Upper East Side and East Harlem, unveiled the Carmen Ana Unanue Galleries, the first space dedicated to the museum’s Permanent Collection.
The galleries will showcase on a rotating basis highlights from one of the oldest and most important collections of Caribbean, Latino, and Latin American art in the U.S., along with related events and educational programs.
Mexican-American painter Ester Hernández. Sun Mad (Sol loco). 1982.
El Museo’s Permanent Collection includes over 6,500 works spanning
more than 800 years of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino art.
The inaugural exhibition, curated by Elvis Fuentes, is called Voces y Visiones: Four Decades Through El Museo’s Permanent Collection.
This exhibition takes viewers through a timeline of El Museo’s history in relation to the history of Latin American and Caribbean art in New York, the United States, and internationally.
Coinciding with the launch of El Museo’s 40th Anniversary festivities, it will be presented alongside Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis, which I covered for the Huffington Post.
El Museo del Barrio’s Permanent Collection both serves and defines its institutional mission by tracing the paths of its growth and shaping its programs’ themes.
“We are immensely proud to inaugurate an exclusive space for our rich collection. Representing the DNA of our institution, it spans from its Puerto Rican roots to a wide variety of Latin cultures, reflecting the museum’s continuous expansion over the last forty years,” says Julián Zugazagoitia, El Museo’s Director and CEO.
The galleries have been named after Carmen Ana Unanue, a longtime supporter of El Museo. “It is with great pride that we are naming them after Mrs. Unanue,” continues Zugazagoitia.
“Her involvement in the philanthropic, educational, and humanitarian world has greatly influenced our institution, as well as Latinos’ lives throughout the continent.”
Marcos Dimas. Lolita Lebrón: Puerto Rican Freedom Fighter. 1971.
The inaugural Voces y Visiones exhibition includes a rich and varied range of artworks and historical objects from the Permanent Collection ranging from Pre-Columbian Taíno works, to Santos and other devotional objects, prints and posters, and modern and contemporary art.
Presented in three sections that focus on milestones in the history of El Museo, Voces y Visiones encompasses more than 150 pieces of artwork documentation and memorabilia from a variety of mediums and cultures.
Starting with the Foundation of El Museo and works acquired from its inception in 1969 through approximately 1977, the first section will highlight the cultural significance of El Museo’s beginnings, a period coinciding with the later part of the Civil Rights Movement, which saw a heightened interest and awareness in the traditions of Caribbean, Latino and Latin American art, culture, and tradition.
Anchored in the predominantly Puerto Rican community of Spanish Harlem, El Museo del Barrio – “The Museum of the Neighborhood” – emerged during this period as a center for the preservation and promotion of its cultural expressions amidst the struggle of minority groups for a better representation within U.S. culture.
Highlights in this section include photographs by En Foco co-founder Roger Cabán such as Bodega, East 110 Street, NYC; a video of Pedro Petri’s poetry reading of “Puerto Rican Obituary” in support of the Young Lords Party’s takeover of First Baptist Church to start a free breakfast program; Lolita Lebrón Freedom Fighter by co-founder of Taller Boricua Marcos Dimas; and Children of Treblinka, a mixed media work made out of debris from El Barrio by Raphael Montañez Ortiz, El Museo’s founding director.
The middle section will focus on El Museo’s expansion from 1977 to 1991, when it moved to its current location, the Heckscher Building at 104th Street and Fifth Avenue, situated at the crossroads of its founding community and Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile.
As founder of Orphans International Worldwide, I was fascinated to learn that the building once housed an orphanage. Our orphans, including children in the Dominican Republic, are taught the importance of art in their day-to-day lives. My dream is that one of them will one day be exhibited in el Museo.
Pepón Osorio. La Cama (The Bed). 1987.
During this period, El Museo not only grew in size, but it also began to broaden its focus, expanding its holdings to include art from other Latin American and Caribbean countries such as Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Mexico, as communities from these regions expanded in New York.
The exhibition will highlight El Museo’s increasingly active engagement in the aesthetic and cultural debates of the time, significant to both New York and Latin American art.
Artworks represented in this section include trompe l’oeil painting Black is Black by Claudio Bravo, geometric painting Red on Red by Carmen Herrera; The Bed, a neo-Baroque installation by Pepón Osorio; and a print from the portfolio The Tower, by Rolando Peña.
Carmen Herrera. Red on red (Rojo sobre rojo). 1959.
The final section will include works acquired from 1992 to the present, yet another period of tremendous expansion enriched by the acquisition funds which were intended to further El Museo’s involvement in contemporary art, photography, and works from local movements of Latino artists.
Consolidating its position as a leading institution on the cultural map of New York City, this period has seen El Museo renew its professional capacities, continue the growth of the Permanent Collection, and create a platform for Puerto Rican, Latino, and Latin American contemporary artists, while at the same time critically revisiting and celebrating these rich cultural and artistic heritages.
Selections in this section include a cockfight painting by Miguel Luciano; The Flag, part of an installation by Nicolás Domit-Estévez; Homage to Tony Peña by Freddy Rodríguez; I’m Loved by Iliana Emilia García; Out of Balance by Alfredo Jaar; and Fox in the Mirror by Liliana Porter.
What I found truly fascinating was the exhibition’s signature piece by Gabriel de la Mora. This work deals with Google searches on both the multiplexities of Latino communities and cultures that the museum serves, and the diversity of its brilliant collection.
Among the oldest works in the collection are those of the Taíno, the dominant culture in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, and the Bahamas from approximately 1200 to 1500 A.D.
Comprised of sculptural objects, ceramics, tools, dance, music, and poetry, these pieces are important elements of the Caribbean's Pre-Columbian past.
David Alfaro Siqueiros. Fuego (Fire). 1939.
Photo courtesy Colección Andrés Blaisten, Mexico City, Mexico.
© 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), N.Y. / SOMAAP, Mexico City.
The Collection also includes later folk art pieces from Puerto Rico and across Latin America and the Caribbean.
Among these holdings are devotional objects from Catholic customs and Vodun traditions originating in West Africa, including santos de palo (wooden saints) mostly from Puerto Rico, ex-votos, or votive offerings of prayer and gratitude, and Vodun drapeaux, beaded and sequined flags used in spiritual rituals.
Other folk art holdings include festival and ceremony masks, textiles, and other objects. Among El Museo’s holdings from the early part of the 20th century through today are works tracing developing modern ideas about abstraction and representation.
The Collection includes archaeological objects from the Taíno culture as well as fine art photographs, and contemporary works that have been influenced by the Taíno legacy.
The show’s curator Elvis Fuentes told me, “Voces y Visiones is about how diverse we Latinos are, in both what we inherit, and what we create to express ourselves, and change our culture for the better. That’s why there are so many issues that interest us – and so many means to deal with them.”
Elvis Fuentes is the type of Thought Leader and Global Citizen that gives me the enthusiasm to write my stories. He is an asset to the City of New York, as his show Voces y Visiones is a gift to the world.
Photos of reception attendees by John Lee in New York.