THE HEADLINES

JUMPING SHIP? Smack bang in the middle of the Bronx Museum’s very expensive renovation project, its executive director has decided to leave. Klaudio Rodriguez, who has led the museum since 2020, is moving to Florida to take charge of the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in St. Petersburg. He was instrumental in getting the $33 million expansion and facelift off the ground so his departure may come as a surprise to some. “It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with the staff and board of the Bronx Museum over the past seven years,” Rodriguez said in a statement. “I am leaving the museum in great hands and with a great team.” Shirley Solomon, the museum’s deputy director, and its chief advancement officer, Yvonne Garcia, will serve as interim co-leaders until the next director is signed up. Rodriguez will take the MFA reigns from Anne-Marie Russell, who quit on March 1. Her departure was announced in November 2023, just over 12 months after she first joined the museum as interim director. He short tenure came right after controversy linked to an exhibition of Greek antiquities at the MFA, many of which were revealed to have suspect provenance documentation. 

DAVID AND GOLIATH. A lawsuit filed by a cohort of artists against Midjourney, Stability AI, and other companies dabbling in AI has been green-lighted by a judge, despite some claims being dismissed. The artists claim that the popular AI services broke copyright law by training on a dataset that included their work and, in some cases, their users can directly reproduce copies of their work. Last year, a judge allowed a direct copyright infringement complaint against Stability, which operates the Stable Diffusion AI image generator. However, he binned a load of other claims and asked the artists’ lawyers to add more detail to them. In the most recent, though, the revised cases have convinced the judge to approve another claim of induced copyright infringement against Stability. Who will win, artist or AI corps?

THE DIGEST

How do you choose which museums to visit in Paris? A safe bet is to ask the director of Art Basel Paris, Clément Deléphine. He’s in the know. [FT]

A museum in Tel Aviv is hiding its most valuable works in the basement as Israel fears the wrath of Iran. Paintings by Pablo Picasso and Gustav Klimt are among the works being secured underground by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in case Tehran fires missiles at the Israeli city as regional tensions flare. [The Times of Israel]

Find out how one of Japan’s most revered contemporary artists, Yoshitomo Nara, and others are subverting the country’s cute “kawaii” aesthetic to question the world we live in. [BBC]

A solitary gold coin may fetch more than $1 million at auction as an ancient coin hoard goes under the hammer after a century of secrecy. [Business Insider].

THE KICKER

ONE FELL SCOOP. The Museum of Ice Cream in Manhattan is being sued by a man who injured himself in the sprinkle pool. Described by The Art Newspaper as “the millennial-pink, dessert-themed ‘experium’ that promises to help visitors ‘reimagine the way [they] experience ice cream,’” the museum looks like it’s made for Instagram. Jeremy Schorr was visiting the joint with his daughter in 2023 when he suffered “severe and permanent personal injuries,” according to the lawsuit. He claims the museum “failed to warn… visitors that it is unsafe to jump or plunge into the sprinkle pool, while encouraging them to do so through its advertising, marketing and promotional materials.” Schorr, who is represented by the Staten Island-based personal injury firm Perrone, also argues that there weren’t enough sprinkles in the pool. We’ve all been there, when the ice cream man is a little tight with the hundreds and thousands. [Artnet News]

Jasmine Wahi.

This is a moment of reckoning in our industry. Museums and art institutions have to put in the work to divest themselves of oppressive legacies. That means rethinking how they engage with their employees, what their staffs look like—from visitor services to curatorial to senior leadership—and who their audiences are. It means showing more artists of color, more Black artists, more brown artists, more Indigenous artists—and making sure that people from those communities are seeing that artwork. It also means that museums need to call their boards to task to support that mission.

Museums and institutions should be for the people; the question museums need to think about is how we can approach new viewers and welcome them into our spaces as active and equal audience members. Diversity is not inclusion, and there’s more to decolonizing museum space than just educational programs. When I started my current position at the Bronx Museum, I came in thinking of Black Lives Matter as a mandate to center the Black, Indigenous, and other people of color in this space, because those are also the communities I serve, and want to speak to as a curator.

Next year is the Bronx Museum’s fiftieth anniversary, and I’m currently working on exhibitions that explore the intersection of visibility and activism. One exhibition asks womanist artists to share their ideas about futurity. Another looks at the endemic nature of white supremacy in this country. When we started planning these shows, we obviously weren’t expecting COVID-19, or quarantine, or the uprisings against police brutality, but in some ways they have created a new lens for looking at everything. That’s partly because the pandemic has exacerbated and amplified the cracks in the system that already existed, making them more visible. The Bronx is one of the places hit hardest by the coronavirus, with the highest rate of COVID cases and deaths in the city. This disparity is related to systemic oppression: finances, race, and equity are deeply linked. The one silver lining I see from COVID is that it’s forcing museum professionals to think about how to recalibrate our approach to sharing exhibitions. How can we make them more accessible and visible across geographies? How can we create a dynamic experience for an audience beyond our physical reach, that’s more than just an online viewing room?

I have been thinking about how an art institution can address systemic violence without being exploitative and voyeuristic. How do you portray abuses without exacerbating a type of pain, and get the message across that these issues are very real, without exploiting Black, brown, and Indigenous people in the process? Police brutality and police reform have been on my mind for a long time. One of the exhibitions I’m working on developed out of thinking about government violence and the violence in our justice system. What’s happening right now is neither shocking nor surprising, but the visibility is being rightfully amplified. As people witness acts of violence with their own eyes, I think it will affect the types of discussions we have, and the entry points to those conversations. The shows I’m planning won’t necessarily change, but the type of information I provide to contextualize the work will definitely be different.

I told myself a long time ago that I didn’t want to work for an institution, because in my mind—right or wrong—museums felt hegemonic, rooted in a tradition that I didn’t think would change. My practice as a curator has always been oriented around social justice and social equity.

I broke my own rule and accepted a position at the Bronx Museum, in part because they have already been doing this type of work. Everyone I’ve encountered at the museum is dedicated to orienting what we do around the communities that we serve. There are so many incredible artists and curators out there who believe that art really is a conduit for social change. Societies both create art and learn from art. My hope is that one day, the position of a “social justice curator” won’t need to exist: it will just be a given that socially oriented exhibitions belong in institutional spaces.

View of the exhibition “Abortion is Normal,” 2019. Photo Coke O’Neal

There are some exciting shows coming up at Project for Empty Space, an organization I cofounded ten years ago in Newark. Along with Rebecca Pauline Jampol, Marilyn Minter, Gina Nanni, Laurie Simmons, and Sandy Tait, I’m working on a new iteration of the show “Abortion Is Normal” [originally staged in two parts at Galerie Eva Presenhuber and Arsenal Contemporary in New York, January–February 2020]. We’re planning to expand the premise to include more global perspectives on reproductive justice and bodily autonomy. I want to take a deeper and more nuanced look into the various aspects of “choice,” and dig into the histories and legacies of the fight for equitable reproductive healthcare.

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Recently, most of the reading I’ve done for pleasure has been dystopian science fiction, like Octavia Butler’s two-book “Parable” series [1993–98] and Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem [2008]. Part of the appeal is that so much of what happens in these fictional works feels real now. It’s counterintuitive, but I’m finding something comforting about them, partly because of the perseverance of the characters. In Parable of the Sower [1993], the first book in Butler’s series, the protagonist is a young Black woman. For me, a future in which a fellow woman of color is the heroine is an important future, even under dystopian circumstances. The truly dystopian aspects of the story also influence how I currently think about the future: impending environmental devastation, for example, looms large in my mind. These ideas are worming their way into my upcoming exhibitions, particularly the show about futurity.

As a counterbalance, I’ve been listening to Sufi music by Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Abida Parveen. My understanding of music is completely pedestrian, so it’s hard to articulate what I love about them formally, but the energy and fervor of Nusrat’s guttural praises reverberates through my whole body. I can only understand bits and pieces of the lyrics, but the devotional sentiment of Qawwali music is transcendent.

Khari Turner’s bedroom studio space in Harlem, New York.

I recently did a virtual studio visit with Khari Turner, an artist who is currently pursuing an MFA at Columbia. I love drawings and paintings that feel visceral in their gesture, and Khari’s drawings possess this kind of movement. They have a pulse that’s both convulsive and very controlled, and they seem to envelop the viewer. That frenetic energy is anchored by photorealist facial features and, sometimes, limbs. The paintings Khari showed me were saturated with color, and evoked a sense of jubilation. Moments of joy are so important right now: social justice in art is not just about illustrating injustice. It’s also about fighting for our right to be joyful.

Mario Berrio: The Augur, 2019, collage with Japanese paper and watercolor on canvas, 96 by 80 inches.

Maria Berrio is one of my favorite artists, and I was floored, as usual, when I had the opportunity to see over Zoom what she’s been working on during this time. Her new works evoke a fantastical future, a world that has wisps of apocalypse trailing through it, but still manages to be beautiful. The works are lush, with thick, sprawling landscapes, and some include haunting figures with blank piercing faces. There is something isolating—both peaceful and lonely—in Maria’s work. Right now, it feels particularly poignant, while I’m sequestered as someone in a high-risk group for COVID.

—As told to Rachel Wetzler

By the mid-1970s, the city’s housing and development administrator, Roger Starr, was openly advocating what he called “planned shrinkage,” a policy designed to steer resources away from what he considered to be economically unproductive areas like the South Bronx and, by extension, their inhabitants. Convinced that these neighborhoods, largely populated by poor black and Puerto Rican residents, weren’t worth fixing, Starr proposed the withdrawal of city services in order to accelerate their demise.¹ For Matta-Clark the implications of words like “renewal,” at least when used by officials like Starr, were clear: as the artist noted in a 1976 interview, “the city is just waiting for the social and physical condition [of the South Bronx] to deteriorate to the point that the borough can redevelop the whole area into the industrial park they really want.”²

Like the corporate property developers he openly reviled—in his words, they belonged to “an industry that profligates [sic] suburban and urban boxes as a context for insuring a passive, isolated consumer”³—Matta-Clark took these blighted districts as his raw material. But revitalization was not his goal. In the building cuts he produced between 1972 and 1978, when he died of cancer at age thirty-five, Matta-Clark worked against the grain of his architectural training, sawing into abandoned structures and cutting away at their floors, walls, and facades. Rather than improving these decaying buildings in any conventional sense, Matta-Clark’s cuts served in part to magnify extant signs of neglect and disuse to the point of absurdity, serving as something like a funhouse mirror reflection of ’70s urbanism and its failings. Matta-Clark often used the term “anarchitecture” to express his approach to the built environment. First coined as the name of a short-lived group of artists he assembled to think through “metaphoric voids, gaps, leftover spaces”⁴ (the other members were Laurie Anderson, Tina Girouard, Suzanne Harris, Jene Highstein, Bernard Kirschenbaum, Richard Landry, and Richard Nonas), “anarchitecture” could designate a set of projects, a theory of property and space, or a mode of working.

“Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect” at the Bronx Museum foregrounds the artist’s engagement with the borough, where he produced several formative works. Though these projects have often been overshadowed by more spectacular cuts Matta-Clark made elsewhere—for instance, Splitting (1974), an entire house in suburban New Jersey sawed in half—curators Antonio Sergio Bessa and Jessamyn Fiore argue that it was his encounters with the social and spatial conditions of the Bronx of the 1970s that laid the foundations for his practice. 

In the series Bronx Floors (1972–73), Matta-Clark surreptitiously entered several empty residential buildings and excised rectangular segments from the ceiling and floor. Like Robert Smithson’s “nonsites,” which Matta-Clark first encountered at Cornell, each of these floor works existed in two parts. While the voids remained uptown—at least until the buildings were inevitably demolished—the segments of sandwiched drywall, wood, and tattered linoleum were removed and exhibited elsewhere as sculptural fragments alongside photographs of the cuts.

For Matta-Clark, the appeal of the Bronx was partly pragmatic: these interventions could take place without permission because there was rarely anyone to ask. As property values plummeted, thousands of building owners stopped paying their mortgages and simply walked away. (Others set the structures on fire for the insurance money.) As the artist recalled in a 1977 interview, the buildings he explored in the South Bronx were “not part of anybody’s protective property motive,” leaving them free for the taking. “The wild dogs, the junkies and I used these spaces to work out some life problem, in my case having no socially acceptable place to work.”⁵

But working in the Bronx also served a symbolic purpose. The scope of the borough’s devastation epitomized the failure of modern urban planning and the hubris of post-Corbusian architects like his professors at Cornell, who approached the rhythms of urban life as an abstract problem to be plotted out on a grid. “Work with abandoned structures began with my concern for the life of the city,” Matta-Clark wrote in a 1975 artist statement. “The availability of empty and neglected structures was a prime textual reminder of the ongoing fallacy of renewal through modernization.”⁶

The care with which Matta-Clark composed the photographic and filmic documentation that accompanied his building cuts suggests he knew that few people would experience his architectural interventions firsthand. None of the modified interiors survive today, but even during the artist’s lifetime, their audience was primarily limited to a few adventurous friends and patrons. Often shot at oblique angles, the photographs convey a sense of the extreme perceptual destabilization produced by the cuts. In Bronx Floor: Threshole (1972), for instance, the artist excised the area spanning an interior threshold so that the horizontal void carved from the floor meets the empty vertical frame of the doorway, resulting in vertiginous views into the spaces above and below. The camera’s tendency to flatten and distort space amplifies the effects of Matta-Clark’s disorienting structural manipulations, compressing the building’s features into a sequence of interlocking planes. In later works, he took this idea even further by creating dynamic photocollages that depicted his building cuts from multiple incompatible perspectives, as if to evoke the experience of moving around and through them.

The exhibition juxtaposes Matta-Clark’s Bronx building cuts with another extensive but less frequently acknowledged body of work that drew inspiration from the borough’s emerging graffiti culture. Included in the show are a series of tightly cropped black-and-white photographs capturing segments of spray-painted walls and train cars, over which Matta-Clark often colored in the vibrant tags by hand, as well as a segment from Graffiti Truck (1973), for which he invited Bronx residents to tag a parked van as they pleased, later cutting it into pieces with a blowtorch. In the past, the graffiti pieces have often been treated as curiosities ancillary to the more important cuts; here, the curators frame the two bodies of work as interdependent. As Bessa writes in his catalogue essay, the graffiti series “goes to the core of Matta-Clark’s idea of anarchitecture,” suggesting that the cuts were strongly informed by the ways in which Bronx taggers made unsanctioned creative use of the streets and structures around them.⁷

The exhibition ends with two of Matta-Clark’s most ambitious building cuts, positioning them as formal and theoretical elaborations on the ideas first explored in Bronx Floors. For Conical Intersect, created for the 1975 Paris Biennale, he tunneled through two adjacent seventeenth-century town houses slated for demolition as the Centre Pompidou was under construction nearby. For Day’s End, made earlier that same year, Matta-Clark broke into an abandoned warehouse at Pier 52 in Chelsea and carved large apertures into the sides of the building and through the floor, opening up views of the Hudson waterfront and allowing sunlight to stream into the dark, cavernous space. Alongside photographs and preparatory drawings, two gorgeous films show the artist at work as he performs the role of dissident contractor managing each site’s transformation.

In addition to anarchitectural cuts, Matta-Clark made building interventions of another kind, buying properties in SoHo and renovating them into exhibition spaces and live-work lofts. By the mid-1970s, loft conversions, unlike the cuts he made in the Bronx or at the Chelsea piers, were not only sanctioned but encouraged by city officials and other New York powerbrokers eager to see districts like SoHo reinvented.⁸ Yet the two practices were, in the artist’s own view, fundamentally linked: “Living in New York creates such a need for adaptation that raw, uninhabitable spaces constantly had to be transformed into studios or exhibition areas,” he said in an interview a year before his death. “I imagine this is one of the ways that I became used to approaching space on an aggressive level.”⁹

Matta-Clark’s assistant Gerry Hovagimyan once described the artist’s intentions for Day’s End as a kind of insurrectionary reconfiguration of public space, like the barricades of the Paris Commune.¹⁰ But today, something else comes to mind. Pier 52 sits a block away from the High Line; the surrounding area is now home to some of the most expensive real estate in the entire city, its prices bolstered in part by the developer-friendly rezoning scheme that accompanied the High Line’s conversion from condemned urban waste to picturesque elevated park.

Not long after Matta-Clark completed Day’s End, it attracted the attention of the authorities, who threatened the artist with criminal charges. On the advice of a lawyer, he produced a statement explaining his intent, in which he described the derelict piers as “a veritable mugger’s playground” largely used by “a recently popularized sadomasochistic fringe.” Given this debased state, he explained, he felt justified in his decision “to enter such a premises with the desire to improve the property, to transform the structure in the midst of its ugly criminal state into a place of interest, fascination, and value.”¹¹ Though we might forgive Matta-Clark’s rhetorical flourishes here as tactical, they also point to the ease with which the subversive thrill of the cuts could be redirected toward the sanitizing work of urban renewal, employed as aesthetic tropes by starchitects and corporate developers. If the High Line seems like a corruption of Matta-Clark’s urban vision, with its carefully placed beds of weeds and reconstructed decay used to market neighboring multimillion-dollar condos, it might also be its logical conclusion.    

Endnotes

1. Roger Starr, “Making New York Smaller,” New York Times Magazine, Nov. 14, 1976, pp. 225, 241–43. See also Marshall Berman, “Emerging from the Ruins,” Dissent, Winter 2014, p. 62.

2. Gordon Matta-Clark quoted in Donald Wall, “Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections,” Arts, May 1976, quoted in Antonio Sergio Bessa, “Gordon Matta-Clark and the Problem of Architecture,” Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect, Antonio Sergio Bessa and Jessamyn Fiore, eds., New York and London, Bronx Museum of the Arts and Yale University Press, pp. 8–10.

3. Gordon Matta-Clark, “Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark, September 1977” in Gordon Matta-Clark, ed. Florent Bex, Antwerp, Internationaal Cultureel Centrum, 1977, p. 9.

4. Gordon Matta-Clark and Liza Béar, “Interview: Splitting the Humphrey Street Building,” Avalanche, December 1974, p. 34.

5. Matta-Clark, “Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark, September 1977,” p. 9.

6. Gordon Matta-Clark, “Work With Abandoned Structures,” 1975, in Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Selected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure, Barcelona, Ediciones Poligrafa, 2006, p. 141.

7. Bessa, p. 13.

8. Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, pp. 43–57.

9. Matta-Clark, “Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark, September 1977,” p. 8.

10. Bessa, p. 10.

11. Gordon Matta-Clark quoted in Gordon Matta-Clark, ed. Corinne Diserens, London and New York, Phaidon, 2003, p. 12.

Two exhibitions––one extending from 1950 to the present and the other focused on the 1990s through today––bring artworks made in Cuba to US audiences.

EVEN BEFORE the December 2014 announcement of the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba, several major US museums had begun organizing comprehensive shows of contemporary Cuban art. Their openings this spring came on the heels of both frenzy for all things Cuban and a new uncertainty about what changes the Trump administration may effect. “Wild Noise/Ruido Salvaje,” presented by the Bronx Museum of the Arts through July 3, and “Adiós Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950,” which closed in May at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and opens on November 11 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, quickly bumped up against the limits of US-Cuban relations. Both exhibitions were originally intended to include works from Cuba’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA), which exhibited some eighty pieces from the Bronx Museum’s collection for the first part of “Wild Noise/Ruido Salvaje” in 2015. But the risk that artworks entering the United States might be seized due to claims concerning properties confiscated during the revolution dissuaded Cuban institutions from significant lending. The US institutions were forced to rely largely on private collections, artists’ loans, and American museum holdings.

The shows vary markedly in their scale, logic, and works, but complement each other to a degree. “Adiós Utopia,” billed by its three curators as “the largest and most important exhibition of Cuban contemporary art ever organized,” ¹ encompasses more than one hundred outstanding pieces. It is resolutely epic––somewhat paradoxically, given the curators’ desire to counter the revolution’s own epic rhetoric. “Wild Noise,” by contrast, features a more eclectic selection of sixty-odd pieces heavily weighted toward the 1990s onward, with a few artworks from the 1970s and 1980s.

The lead curators of “Adiós Utopia,” Gerardo Mosquera, Elsa Vega, and René Francisco––respectively, an acclaimed critic and curator, an MNBA specialist on Cuban abstraction of the 1950s and ’60s, and a renowned artist and teacher––have stated that they set out to foreground art rather than history. Yet the show’s title––triumphant or elegiac, depending on how one reads it––corrals its diverse objects into an overarching narrative. As originally conceived by the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), the exhibition was to be a more comprehensive and chronological show, but complications with loans and scale forced the thematic reframing.

“Adiós Utopia” conveys how artists engaged the social utopias formulated in Cuba over the past half-century, and how they were subsequently disillusioned. As the exhibition makes clear, there have, in fact, been many goodbyes, strung out over decades. These were often occasioned by moments in which the revolution itself parted ways with the utopian ideas with which it began: Fidel Castro’s 1961 statement that within the revolution anything was possible, but against it, nothing; his approval of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; the forced self-critique of poet Heberto Padilla in 1971; the 1989 execution of a high-ranking general accused of narco-trafficking, and so on. Artistic shifts broadly tracked these historical events, and while “Adiós Utopia” doesn’t supply copious background, excellent essays in an extensive catalogue accompanying the show shed light on the intertwining histories of Cuban art and society.

Mosquera details, for instance, how a wan, Soviet-inspired Socialist Realism, neither truly imposed nor embraced in the 1970s, followed directly from Cuba’s forced entry into the Soviet economic bloc (COMECON), itself triggered by Cuba’s failure to make good on an all-out drive to reap a ten-million-ton sugar harvest. In a section of “Adiós Utopia” dedicated to Cuban poster art, the bold serigraphs Olivio Martínez’s made between 1969 and 1970 each celebrate one of the potential million-ton increments. Mosquera also addresses the exhibition’s paucity of art from the 1970s: the era, he claims, simply did not yield much quality work––largely because of Soviet authoritarianism. An illuminating, searing essay by René Francisco documents conflicts between Cuban artists and official cultural arbiters that led to the eventual exodus of the storied 1980s generation. Essays by Iván de la Nuez and Antonio Eligio (Tonel) counter the exhibition’s own teleological narrative from enthusiasm to despair, charting how utopia has been for Cuban artists a protean and changing concept. Utopia was commandeered both from above through restrictive cultural policy and from below by artists for whom it meant not militant political revolution but, variously, popular culture, global artistic contemporaneity, the grotesque and carnal, and a Rousseauian interest in nature. These other utopias offered alternative visions of pleasure, abundance, and liberal mores, all of which contrasted with the revolutionary leadership’s often sacrificial, largely middle-class aesthetics and ethics.

IN A SURPRISING and welcome move, the Houston installation of “Adiós Utopia” opened with 1950s abstract painting. Many of the featured artists are just now receiving overdue attention, including Pedro de Oraá, Salvador Corratgé, Dolores (Loló) Soldevilla, and Sandu Darie. A large mixed-medium work by Soldevilla was accompanied by two of her bronze wire sculptures, while several Darie paintings opposed one of his playful “transformable structures,” small painted wood sculptures designed to be manipulated. A small room offered a detailed timeline of developments in Cuban art and politics since the 1950s, and a monitor played clips from Unfinished Spaces, a 2011 documentary about the 1962 design, construction, and incompletion of a truly utopian project, Cuba’s National Art Schools, partially built on the grounds of a former golf course.

Informed by geometric abstraction in Europe and the Americas––the Romanian-born Darie, for instance, was in touch with the Argentine Madí movement in the 1940s––abstract painters in Cuba embraced the revolution and saw geometric abstraction’s nonpersonal, universal style as consonant with a utopian spirit. But as revolutionary taste began to favor the figurative and realist, abstract art was viewed with skepticism. With notable exceptions––Soldevilla, Oraá, and Darie among them––many abstract painters changed styles or disappeared from the scene after 1963. By reintroducing these important works into a narrative of utopian impulses, the curators rightfully address Cuban art’s long-standing connection to social movements and point to ways in which utopia meant more than the institutionalized revolution.

As revolutionary taste began to favor the figurative and realist, abstract art was viewed with skepticism. Abstraction from the 1960s gave way a bit suddenly to galleries devoted to the theme of “the cult and deconstruction of the revolutionary nation.” Here, the revolution’s icons undergo an overhaul, with numerous works intervening in representations of Ernesto “Ché” Guevara, Fidel Castro, and their peers. Juan Francisco Elso’s sculpture For America (José Martí), 1986, renders Cuba’s national hero, a poet who died early in the 1895 War of Independence, in wood and earth, pierced by wooden fleurs de lis and wielding a machete as if he were a mambí soldier, one of the largely Afro-Cuban guerrilla fighters from the nation’s first war of independence (1868–78). Elso was an important figure in 1980s New Cuban Art, which rejected earlier realisms and orthodoxies for Pop, performance, kitsch, Arte Povera, Land art, institutional critique, and Conceptualism. But “Adiós Utopia” also seeks to highlight less canonized or previously shunned artists. Here, Antonia Eiriz’s dark, expressionistic paintings Those Above and Those Below and Standing (both 1963) are noteworthy; in 1968 Eiriz stopped painting altogether and turned to teaching children how to use papier-mâché, returning to the canvas only after moving to Miami in the 1990s.

Eiriz’s works featuring shadowy brushstrokes and intimations of skulls played off Raúl Martínez’s riotously colorful Pop art portraits of revolutionary figures brushing shoulders with the artist and his male lover. Martínez was a leading proponent of the abstract-expressionist style before adopting a Pop aesthetic. His 9 Repetitions of Fidel and Microphones (1968) comprises different versions of Castro’s face caught mid-harangue. The work may have been taken as hagiographic in its time, but it suggests Castro’s ubiquity and his control of communications as his increasingly misshapen face floats among microphones resembling phalluses in varying degrees of erection. At the painting’s center, the leader’s open mouth forms a black void that emits endless sound––or silence.

THE CURATORS passed over some of the less figurative work of the 1980s––I would have welcomed Gustavo Pérez Monzón’s delicate pieces made from stone and thread, or Ricardo Brey’s sculptures using natural materials––in order to highlight revolutionary mythology. Tomás Esson’s painting My Homage to Ché (1987) uses photographer Alberto Korda’s famous image of Guevara but portrays him as a black man, like the artist himself. In the painting, Ché is half-hidden by a pale, fleshy pig copulating with an amalgamation of female body parts. Ché’s mouth appears to be rimming the pig’s anus, making the whole thing a scatological explosion of fucking-or perhaps of being fucked over by the masculinist principles of Ché’s “New Man.” The painting was censored, and is shown here for only the second time.

While glowing orbs are common in Bedia’s work, here they suggest the souls of those lost to ill-fated journeys. Esson’s paintings are among several works exploring the grotesque. A couple of stellar pieces by Umberto Peña, who abandoned painting after his work provoked reprimand, recall Philip Guston. In You Go Plaff (1967), a set of teeth clench a lightning bolt while emerging from a digestive tract swimming in a toilet bowl.

One of my favorite pieces, José Ángel Toirac’s video Opus (2005), is the only work shared by both shows. (Tania Bruguera’s Head Down would have been another, but she pulled it from the Bronx Museum to protest what she saw as the institution’s too-cozy relations with Cuban authorities. ² ) In Toirac’s video, sequences of numbers serve as subtitles for an audio track spliced together from statistics cited in Castro’s speeches. The size of a 1995 potato harvest, Cuba’s share of gold medals at the Olympics, and the number of children dying of preventable diseases in other countries, say, are all grist for this maniacal enumeration. The voice, at once imposing and reedy, generates a frisson when fragments cut each other off, glitchlike, as if the speaker were tripping over his efforts to sum everything up.

In a section labeled “Sea, Borders, Exile,” utopia and its inverse seemed to have fallen away, and we’re left with daily struggle. Associated with promise and obstruction, freedom and death, the ocean has always loomed large in Cuban art and literature. Here, abstract paintings and sculptures of rafts joined photographs documenting decades of unstaunched departures. An early 1990s photograph by Manuel Piña captures a young man from behind as he leaps from Havana’s seawall esplanade, the Malecón, during the height of the post-Soviet period of scarcity. The photograph is a serene composition of horizon, ocean, and body, but its punctum for me was a big toe just visible through a hole in the boy’s sneaker. Fusing insular and religious themes, José Bedia’s To the Possible Limit (1996) is an immense, semicircular painting. At the top, a ribbon the color of old parchment is limned with the facades and narrow streets of Centro Habana. Below, the Atlantic Ocean fans out in a deep periwinkle studded with shark fins and lights. While glowing orbs are common in Bedia’s work, here they suggest the souls of those lost to ill-fated journeys. Two enormous eyes gazing out from the waters are adorned with symbols used in Afro-Cuban religions, a frequent reference for Bedia, an initiate in Palo Monte, a Kongo-derived faith. A man grasps an inner tube, arms thrown up mid-stroke or mid-surrender, at the edge of the work and the limit of what is bearable.

The grandiosity proper to the revolution’s ambitions––to defy its imperial neighbor and build a socialist utopia on a Caribbean island––resonated with Soviet orders of magnitude. A 1991 work titled Utopia by Eduardo Ponjuán and exhibition co-curator René Francisco (who have often worked together) consists of the word utopia in Cyrillic letters painted across a wall that is hung with five ironic Socialist Realist portraits. And many of the show’s final works are striking in their scale: Los Carpinteros‘ 2006 life-size lighthouse lies tipped on its side, an enlightenment project felled, but now available for inspection; a bold 16-by-49-foot painting installation by Glexis Novoa borrows Soviet aesthetics and faux-Cyrillic typography and explodes them in bright oranges and reds.

If Cuba’s socialist utopia is by now relegated to the past, its historical material is ripe for a new generation to consider. Alejandro González’s 2015 photographs of his cardboard maquettes present important moments in Cuban Revolutionary history: the 1971 National Congress on Education and Culture, the 1972 Inauguration of Lenin Park. The carefully constructed miniature sets, enlarged in stark black-and-white photos, revisit the epic tenor of events and spaces that saw the elaboration of utopian programs and draconian policies.

The exhibition closed with several video pieces. In Four Cubans (1997) by Carlos Garaicoa, veterans of Cuba’s 1975 intervention into Angola’s civil war stare mutely at the camera, the rubble of Havana behind them. Javier Castro’s Golden Age (2012) records children’s hopes for what they may be when they grow up (“a foreigner”). Documentary footage of Los Carpinteros’ exquisite Irreversible Conga (2012) rounds out the show. During the eleventh Havana Biennial, dancers donned all-black attire and sashayed backward toward the Malecón to music playing in reverse. The extravaganza recalled the joyous funeral parades that stud the Atlantic world. ³ But was it a funeral for the revolution, a defiance of its “irreversibility,” or an homage to those who danced Cuba, albeit backward, into the present?

The exhibition’s march through seventy years of art therefore leaves us at a recent Havana Biennial, itself no longer an alternative to but part of the global art market, in a final goodbye to artistic utopias. Los Carpinteros’ conga, however, is more agnostic about where we are headed. It joyously and improbably synchronizes multitudes, including Havana denizens who spontaneously join the dance.

“WILD NOISE” offers a more synchronic snapshot of contemporary Cuban art and a counterpoint to the trajectory from dream to deception. Curated by Corina Matamoros and Aylet Ojeda Jequín, both from Cuba’s MNBA, the exhibition presents divergent reflections on sexuality, religiosity, and contemporary painting, beyond the expected historical references and themes of exile and separation. The pieces are not arranged thematically, but together they trace an almost imperceptible arc away from broad, national themes of departure, hardship, and the country’s architectural and ideological ruins toward a post-conceptualism more concerned with surfaces and with an intimate scale that encompasses neighborhoods and street corners, even sidewalk cracks and paint chips.

The Bronx Museum does well to start with an antechamber lined with powerful works by Ana Mendieta and Belkis Ayón. Mendieta’s photo series “Silueta Works in Iowa” (1976–78) explores the body in nature: Mendieta covered in mud and blending into a tree trunk; a rock pool whose bottom blooms suggestively with a feathery green algae or moss. The sites pulse with presence around suddenly perceptible bodily absences. The central themes in these seminal photographs––part of Mendieta’s exploration of her wrenching departure from Cuba with her sister (sans parents) as part of the US government’s 1960–62 Operation Peter Pan––echo in later artworks. Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’s When I am not here/Estoy allá (1996), for instance, explores the persistence and exhaustion of identity for the Cuban-born, US-based artist, while Arturo Cuenca’s Invisible (1985), a moody watercolor on a photograph of a foggy window, plumbs layers of thwarted perception through various lenses and surfaces (misty windows, the photograph, paint).

Ayón’s arresting collagraphs––prints made using a collage technique––portray figures from Abakuá, the all-male Cuban secret society (derived from Nigerian Ékpè [leopard] societies), to which Ayón gained rare access. In groupings of silhouetted figures, faces bereft of all features except piercing eyes gaze mesmerizingly at the viewer. Afro-Cuban history is again both central and occluded in Bedia’s Mi conuco al pie de la loma (1996), an acrylic of a stylized bull, its flank a hill sporting a tiny figure with a machete. The title, translated as “My Garden at the Foot of a Hill,” refers to the plots of land that slaves could farm for themselves. Inscribed on the bull’s flank is a red anaforuana, an Abakuá sign, which can be read only by initiates.

WORKS FROM THE “Special Period”––the roughly fifteen years of dire scarcity that followed the final end of Soviet economic support in 1991––inevitably underscore the arte povera made as the Cuban economy contracted: Ponjuán and Francisco’s colorful sign Art (1990), for instance, produced amid power outages, simulates a neon sign with paint and found materials. Related themes taken up by artists today, however, exude not crudeness or desperation but polish and abstraction, befitting the new independent Havana galleries exhibiting their work, only recently permitted and often in the form of open studios. (Previously, all galleries were state-run.) Diana Fonseca’s series “Degradations” (2015) features multihued, richly textured palimpsests of chipped paint recovered from Havana’s peeling edifices. José Manuel Fors’s photo-collage Fragments (2006–11) dices up sepia-toned found photographs from family archives, “pixelating” them by hand into tiny squares. Alejandro Campins, a leading young painter known for his subdued, minimal portrayals of historical sites, explores death and time not in Cuban history but at Cairo’s Necropolis, where afternoon shadows and a green awning adorn an Egyptian city of the dead instead of a melancholic Havana.

If Cuba’s socialist utopia is by now relegated to the past, its historical material is ripe for a new generation to consider. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Cuban artists, designers, and curators took an interest in the vernacular aesthetic production that emerged during the period of scarcity. They extensively documented homemade household objects––lanterns made of beer cans, satellite dishes made of cafeteria trays, etc.––as well as the illicit home fabrication that produced them. Today these traditions have been assimilated into artistic practice. Humberto Díaz enjoyed a three-month stint in the Bronx in 2015 as part of a US-Cuba artist exchange. His sculpture from that year is represented by Barber’s Beard, scissors attached to wooden sticks, and is accompanied by New Little Broom (2014), composed of broom heads attached to a multi-pronged tree branch. Both pieces excise functionality, turn from the factory to nature, and place the objects (verging on twee) in the museum.

Rough-hewn 1990s objects are offset by coeval works of delicacy. Ezequiel Suárez’s New Swiss Art (1998–99), inspired by a visit to Jean Dubuffet’s collection of Art Brut, are small compositions in blue and red thread on green sandpaper. Singularly attractive, they might seem merely poetic to a viewer unaware of Suárez’s long career joyfully mocking or boldly defying institutions, while walking the line between art and non-art. (In 1994 he exhibited a work that read institutions are shit and founded, with Sandra Ceballos, the independent gallery Espacio Aglutinador.)

The Bronx Museum’s well-lit galleries for “Wild Noise” facilitate an easy circumnavigation through diverse practices. This big-tent approach leads to decontextualizing but frees the works from inevitably referring back to the revolution, the state, or specifically Cuban history. The topics of slavery and African-derived religions, far from being uniquely Cuban phenomena, offer a timely bridge to US audiences. Even Felipe Dulziades’s series of humorous photographs “Eighteen Reasons to Cease Making Art” (2007–10)––which depicts highly local interventions into the city landscape, such as people gathered under a lone overpass of a highway shorn of flanking roads or a pineapple inexplicably set atop a stone marker at a street intersection––highlights the ingenuity of popular urban aesthetics.

These two exhibitions of Cuban art open in a post-revolutionary present, and in a United States whose utopian fantasies sometimes channel unhinged ideas about a radical free market that hurries us toward the dystopia of planetary apocalypse. Yet the surveys serve to remind viewers of art’s enduring power to activate and engage with social imaginaries. In truth, one can never say goodbye to utopia, given that its root meaning––”no place”––suggests something aspirational rather than concrete. Bidding goodbye to utopia in Houston and Minneapolis may end the run of shows and publications on Cuban art that have invoked the concept (beginning with “Utopian Territories: New Art from Cuba,” Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, 1997, and “Contemporary Art from Cuba: Irony and Survival in the Utopian Island,” Arizona State Art Museum, 1998). Or it may reflect on the forces nurturing contemporary art. “Adiós Utopia” borrows roughly a third of its works from the private collection of Miami-based Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, director of CIFO and today’s most important collector of Cuban art. Does it thus signal the end of that utopia, sometimes associated with 1980s Cuban aesthetics, in which art might be made for neither markets nor collections?

Visitors to the two exhibitions are privy not only to rarely seen examples of contemporary Cuban art from the past decades, but also to recent pieces that work through or altogether overlook the Cuban Revolution’s legacy. Members of a new generation of Cuban artists––including Carlos Martiel, Diana Fonseca, Glenda León, Alejandro Campins, and Reynier Leyva Novo, to name just a few featured in the shows––are making work that, as Iván de la Nuez observes in his catalogue essay, situates itself beyond utopia, but also beyond apocalypse.

CURRENTLY ON VIEW “Wild Noise/Ruido Salvaje,” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, through July 3.

RACHEL L. PRICE is an associate professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University.

Endnotes

1. René Francisco, Gerardo Mosquera, and Elsa Vega, “Adiós Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950,” in Adiós Utopia: Art in Cuba Since 1950, Miami, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, p. 145.

2. See Randy Kennedy, “Artist Pulls Her Work from Bronx Museum of the Arts Cuba Exhibition,” New York Times, Jan. 26, 2017, nytimes.com.

3. See Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, New York, Columbia University Press, 1996.

The Bronx Museum.

COURTESY WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Days after the the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ chairwoman, vice chairwoman, and four other board members resigned over what they see as a mishandling of new initiatives, and a lack of focus on its local outreach, the institution has named two current board members as interim chair and co-vice chair.

The new appointees—Joseph Mizzi as chair and Joan Krevlin as co-vice chair—have affirmed their commitment to the museum’s executive director, Holly Block, easing tensions between the board of the museum and its leadership.

“The board of trustees fully supports the vision and programs that our executive director, Holly Block, has set in place and we are dedicated to pursuing them,” Mizzi said in a statement.

This was not the case under the previous board leadership. In a joint statement emailed to The New York Times upon their resignations, the outgoing chairwoman Laura Blanco and outgoing vice chairwoman Mary Beth Mandanas said, “We are alarmed by the serious nature of these issues and by the lack of an unbiased mechanism for resolving them.”

“While many of our comments concern the executive director and her lack of transparency, we are equally focused on the broader system that has been constructed to erode the power of the board,” the statement continued.

Blanco and Mandanas have cited projects such as the plans for an expensive architectural redesign and an ambitious cultural exchange program with Cuba as evidence of overreaching and lack of organization. They also took issue with Block’s involvement with a blowout party in the Bronx planned by real estate developers that drew criticism for what some thought was exploitation of the borough’s fraught history of violence and poverty.

The course of American art history was irrevocably changed by AIDS, both through lives lost due to government inaction and through the development of new artistic strategies in response to the crisis. “Art AIDS America,” a traveling exhibition originating at the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington, surveys thirty years of American art rewritten by AIDS. The show—which includes 125 works (some of them seminal) by artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Gober, and Nan Goldin—creates a picture of a pioneering movement whose legacy is evident today. 

Organizers Rock Hushka, curator at the Tacoma Art Museum, and Jonathan D. Katz, director of visual studies at the University of Buffalo, N.Y., clearly aim to broaden the often reductive category of “AIDS art.” While there have been art exhibitions about AIDS activism in the past, the ambitious gambit of “Art AIDS America” is to position the crisis as a “generative force,” and to highlight those artists who took it as an impetus “to think about their representational practices first and foremost strategically.” ¹ This more interpretive category includes artists often associated with other concerns, such as feminist artists like Judy Chicago, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer, and African-American artists like Glenn Ligon and Kalup Linzy whose works are often analyzed in relation to race, in order to more comprehensively map AIDS’s impact on art.

Most of the works in the exhibition were produced during the 1980s and ’90s and conjure a time when the role of art was a constant subject of debate. Larry Stanton’s Untitled (Hospital Drawings), 1984, is a series of small, hastily composed crayon drawings declaring i’m going to make it and life is not bad. death is not bad. Hugh Steers’s painting Poster (1990) depicts a man looking back, perhaps in a moment of choice, at an untouched canvas and an activist sign leaning against the wall. Mark Morrisroe’s self-portraits document his bodily breakdown in a series of Polaroids. These moving depictions of personal struggle capture a sense of urgency that empowered some artists while overpowering others, who nonetheless confronted the immensity of the problem head on. 

But other works, like Gran Fury’s installation Let the Record Show (1987/2015), function as “boundary objects,” to use a term introduced in a 1989 paper by sociologists Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer to describe how objects can have “different meanings in different social worlds” while maintaining a “common structure” across them. ² Let the Record Show is exemplary in this regard. Designed for the ground-floor window at New York’s New Museum, it is on view in “Art AIDS America” for the first time since 1987. The installation communicates a barrage of shocking statistics. Facts and figures scroll across a red LED screen, telling the story of Ronald Reagan’s homophobic neglect. Above a pink triangle—the symbol used in Nazi concentration camps to mark gay men—neon letters spell out silence = death. Transposed from window to gallery, the faithful re-creation at the Tacoma Art Museum activates Let the Record Show’s newest and perhaps most unlikely role as an unambiguous work of art.

Hushka, writing about the installation in the catalogue, links the idea of “going viral,” a term coined at the height of the AIDS crisis, to Gran Fury’s media campaigns. “The collective deftly manipulated the technologies and networks of their day and inserted AIDS into conversations within the rarefied art world,” Hushka writes. “Their call to action and images moved through communities like a contagion, specifically like a retrovirus.” ³ His reading of Gran Fury adheres to their stated ideology of “using the art world” but “not making art.” ⁴

The pink triangle graphic was originally designed by a separate organization, the Silence = Death Project, and lent to the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Gran Fury, which served as ACT UP’s propaganda wing, then incorporated it in Let the Record Show.[pq]Artist-activists cared less about ownership of ideas than they did about social effectiveness.[/pq]Art historians Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston have given this as one example of the fluid, sometimes irregular, and often simultaneous membership in artist-activist groups of the time. ⁵ Artist-activists cared less about ownership of ideas or formal originality than they did about social effectiveness. They co-opted Kruger’s iconic style and the advertising tactics of the United Colors of Benetton with equal ease. While their interest in representational strategies, like that of Kruger and other Pictures Generation artists, was often informed by feminist theory, artist-activists working during the AIDS crisis were more likely to play out their practices in public using the methods of political protest. 

Others preferred to hide their AIDS art in plain sight. “I want to be like a virus that belongs to the institution,” wrote Gonzalez-Torres. “All the ideological apparatuses are, in other words, replicating themselves, because that’s the way culture works. So if I function as a virus, an imposter, an infiltrator, I will always replicate myself together with those institutions.” ⁶ In the exhibition, Andres Serrano’s photographic prints hang next to Gonzalez-Torres’s work and employ a similar strategy of “passing.” Milk/Blood (1989) and Blood and Semen III (1990) refer to HIV-carrying fluids in their titles, but the abstract images can look apolitical, even visually conservative. Thus camouflaged, they slipped past the censure of Senator Jesse Helms (who had earlier condemned the artist’s Piss Christ, 1987) and other right-wing politicians who were influential in the cancellation of NEA funds for art exhibitions perceived as indecent.

For Untitled (Buffalo), 1988–89, David Wojnarowicz photographed a diorama showing bison falling off a cliff at the Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. His work draws parallels between the government’s treatment of gays during the AIDS crisis and the slaughter, and near eradication, of American bison in the 1800s. In their paper, Star and Griesemer analyzed museum exhibits much like the one Wojnarowicz photographed. They found that these boundary objects cater to the independent and often contradictory informational needs of museum workers and visitors. The concept of the boundary object is useful for describing the nature of interdisciplinary institutions, as well as artists whose work concerns itself with ecologies and networks rather than individuals.

Jenny Holzer’s “Survival” series (1983–85) consists of mass-produced objects whose packaging features unexpected texts. In the exhibition, condom wrappers bear snippets of a dead-end monologue: protect me from what i want, men don’t protect you anymore, and in a dream you saw a way to survive and were full of joy. The voice in these texts speaks variously for, to, and about the viewer. Art historian David Joselit has pointed out the conundrum this creates: “By holding authorship in suspension, Holzer forces the viewer/reader into the position of evaluating and adjudicating often contradictory points of view.” ⁷ In addition to suggesting a literal boundary between bodies, Holzer’s condoms hold vastly different meanings, depending on one’s proximity to the AIDS crisis—an impression intensified by the shifting voice of the slogans printed on them. In the context of this exhibition, they evoke situations of ambiguity in a world that is inhabited both by people whose lives are consumed by AIDS and by others who are unaware and unaffected. 

Gonzalez-Torres’s sculptural installation “Untitled” (Water), 1995, composed of hanging blue, white, and silver strands of beads, spanned one of the Tacoma Art Museum’s main passageways, creating a border between “Art AIDS America” and the rest of the museum. A viewer who chose to walk through the curtain first had to overcome the minor sacrilege of touching an artwork, in a small but courageous act that brings to mind the uninformed fear of contracting HIV from skin-to-skin contact. “Untitled” (Water) hangs on you as you cross through it and dramatizes the experience of passage. Though the piece itself contains no direct references to AIDS or exhortations to action, it reminds both passersby and the passers-through of their positions as insiders, outsiders, or something between. Like Holzer’s “Survival,” Gonzalez-Torres’s piece emphasizes interchange by activating a boundary. 

Telling history through art’s encounter with AIDS is a big task, and some have argued that in “Art AIDS America” it has only just begun. In the exhibition’s catalogue, Sur Rodney (Sur) warns against limiting the conversation about AIDS to the “pre-cocktail era,” before retroviral HIV drugs became available in 1996, and thus obscuring the ongoing struggle of people living with AIDS in a time when activist fervor and institutional interest alike have waned. ⁸ This exhortation hit home during the show’s run when Tacoma-based artists Chris Jordan and the Tacoma Action Collective pointed out the paltry representation of artists of color in the show. The demonstrations and discussions they led in protest carried out the spirit of direct political action set by the show’s historical examples, challenging the implication that such activism is only a thing of the past. 

The issue of underrepresentation is one of profound relevance to this exhibition because it points to a deeper problem of disintegration and unresolved commitments. Star and Griesemer’s notion of how heterogeneous groups work in tandem, exemplified by artists and artist-activists brought together via the AIDS crisis, is worth revisiting as a key to a rich history and as a mandate for the present. Perhaps this is why a show like this and the boundaries of contact it may yet create are relevant to a world that is always already sorted, where it is ever more difficult to encounter something that wasn’t made for someone like you.

“Art AIDS America,” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, July 13–Sept. 25,.

Endnotes

1. Jonathan D. Katz, “How AIDS Changed American Art,” in Art AIDS America, ed. Rock Hushka and Katz, Tacoma Art Museum and Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2015, p. 24.

2. Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39,” Social Studies of Science, Vol. 19, No. 3, August 1989, pp. 387–420.

3. Rock Hushka, “Undetectable: The Presence of HIV in Contemporary American Art,” Art AIDS America, pp. 128–30.

4. Robert Vazquez-Pacheco, “Artist Talk and Discussion with Artist Collective Gran Fury,” Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Wash., Jan. 10, 2016.

5. Other such groups include Little Elvis, DIVA TV, Testing the Limits, and LAPIT. Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston, AIDS Demographics, Seattle, Bay Press, 1990, p. 18.

6. Gonzalez-Torres, quoted in Katz, “How AIDS Changed American Art,” p. 24.

7. David Joselit, “Survey,” in Jenny Holzer, New York, Phaidon, 1998, p. 48.

8. Sur Rodney (Sur), “Activism, AIDS, Art, and the Institution,” Art AIDS America, p. 80.

Michelle Stuart, Maroc Shoes, 2015, archival inkjet photograph on Hahnemühle paper, 12 x 18 inches.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

‘Theatre of Memory: Photographic Works,” Michelle Stuart’s engrossing and elegant exhibition (through June 26), ably organized by curator and critic Gregory Volk, spotlights a lesser-known aspect of this Land Art pioneer’s practice. The recent installations are prefaced by a pair of works from Stuart’s 1981 “Codex” series, in which paper stained with earth from two sites (Uxmal in the Yucatan and a New Jersey quarry) are framed by a series of site photos that anticipate her current ventures. The 12 photographic grids suggest albums of collected images that have been unbound in order to be seen both as a panorama and individually. The grids function as an idiosyncratic atlas, travelogue, and memoir, simultaneously fictive and factual, timely and timeless, ordered and much less so. Utterly romantic, the images evoke references to poets, writers, and philosophers such as Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, W. G. Sebald, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Stuart poses existential questions at the same time as she praises the Earth, spoiling her viewers with—to paraphrase Rilke—all the wonders she has felt.

Jill Baroff, in a grove, 2016, white walnut wood and Flashe, dimensions variable, installation view.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND THE BRONX MUSEUM OF THE ARTS

Jill Baroff’s outdoor installation (which closed on May 8) was more phenomenal and perceptual, but magical in another way. Long influenced by Japanese aesthetics and its economy of means to create works of discreet, cumulative intensity, she has lopped off branches to form tree trunks arranged in clusters, the surface of each cross section angled and grooved a little differently. Painted one shade of blue, the light repaints them to produce an astonishing array of different blues. The simplicity of the concept is delightful, resulting in a kind of changing, fluidly illuminated sculpture without technology. Baroff also refers to literary sources. The title of the installation, in a grove, refers not only to traditional places of contemplative retreat for Zen masters and literati, but also to the Ryūnosuke Akutagawa short story that inspired Kurosawa’s celebrated 1950 film Rashōmon (another title from another Akutagawa story) in which truth is seen to be complicated, multifaceted, and contingent.

Martin Wong, whose visionary paintings of the 1980s capture the tragic lows and vibrant highs of life on New York’s decaying Lower East Side, received his first and, until now, only retrospective in 1998, at the New Museum, as he was dying of AIDS. After more than a decade during which his work received relatively little critical and curatorial attention, Wong’s paintings have been reappearing in prominent venues, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial, where they have tended to stand out as embodiments of a more authentic, less market-driven art world. 

An avid collector, Wong left behind a rich archive of papers, objects and ephemera, which complements and sheds light on his own artistic production. At New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2012, artist Danh Vo staged an homage to Wong, presenting objects from the late artist’s massive collection of curios, paintings, antiques, calligraphic scrolls and kitsch. (Wong’s mother had been preserving these varied materials in her home since her son’s death in 1999.) In 2014, the Museum of the City of New York showcased Wong’s vast collection of drawings and paintings by graffiti artists. Last spring, an exhibition at San Francisco’s CCA Wattis Institute featured letters and artifacts from Wong’s personal papers, which are held at New York University’s Fales Library.

The culmination of this broad reassessment of Wong’s life and art is now on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. “Martin Wong: Human Instamatic” (the title comes from a moniker Wong adopted while doing street portraits in Eureka, Calif., in the ’70s) is a wide-ranging survey organized by Sergio Bessa, Bronx Museum curatorial director, and Yasmin Ramirez, adjunct curator at the museum and a close friend of the artist.[pq]Wong’s paintings often present human figures as diminished or even obliterated by an overwhelming environment.[/pq]

The exhibition reveals why, even in his active years, Wong was an enigmatic figure. He is described in the Wattis catalogue as “a sort of queer Chinese-Latino fireman cowboy graffitist.” ¹  A San Francisco native who moved to New York in 1978 at the age of 32, Wong became an unlikely fixture in his adopted neighborhood, identifying with bohemian Latino poets, petty criminals and drug abusers. Tall and lanky, he fantasized about beefy firemen and was known for wearing a fireman’s jacket to openings and parties. He painted numerous prison scenes charged with homoerotic desire despite having spent only a single night in prison himself. He developed a signature visual motif: rows of cartoonish gesticulating hands that spell out tabloid headlines or fragments of street poetry in American Sign Language (ASL). These manual characters appear in works Wong referred to as “paintings for the hearing impaired.” He spoke about his canvases in the casual vocabulary used by the graffiti artists he admired, but his archives reveal how intricate and deeply researched his compositions could be. 

There is some controversy among critics and historians as to whether Wong should be considered a self-taught artist. Though he studied ceramics at Humboldt State University in California, Wong learned to paint on his own after he moved to New York. Dan Cameron, who co-curated the artist’s 1998 retrospective, argued in that show’s catalogue that the artist’s work bears a strong kinship with the obsessive visions of such outsider figures as Joseph Yoakum, Martín Ramírez and Adolf Wölfli. In the catalogue for the Bronx exhibition, poet John Yau and art historian Benjamin Binstock counter in separate essays that Wong’s style evolved far more rapidly than that of most self-taught artists. Indeed, both writers are more inclined to compare Wong with canonical painters, ranging from Bosch to Vermeer to Johns. 

The Bronx exhibition makes the case that Wong’s prowess as a painter transcends semantic categories. His vision of Loisaida—a Spanish-inflected term for the Lower East Side popularized in the 1970s by Nuyorican [pq]Wong spoke about his canvases in the casual vocabulary used by the graffiti artists he admired, but his archives reveal how intricate and deeply researched his compositions could be.[/pq]poet Bittman Rivas—offers a contemporary version of the apocalyptic sublime. Echoing the spectacular imagery of Romantic-era figures like J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich, Wong’s paintings often present human figures as diminished or even obliterated by an overwhelming environment. His urban landscapes from the 1980s present a human-built world imbued with the fearsome, awe-inspiring majesty of the untamed wilderness. Wong’s city is an airless territory of obdurate brick walls, padlocked storefronts, chain-link fences topped with coils of razor wire and alleys piled with rubble. The red of crumbling bricks bleeds into ocher skies, blotting out any touch of blue in what seems to be a perpetual twilight. Above ragged skylines, constellations expand like gossamer webs. Meanwhile, the (mostly male) figures who appear in Wong’s works are often dwarfed by the urban canyons around them. These figures also seem completely at home in their blighted surroundings, quietly writing, embracing each other or drifting to sleep in a drug-induced haze. It is a highly romanticized version of a city that offers a zone of existential freedom even as it is beset with the multiple scourges of crack, heroin, crime, homelessness and AIDS. 

Texts superimposed on these sometimes bleak streetscapes are sources of humor, beauty and lyricism. Indeed, Wong’s paintings are laced with language, much of it composed by poet Miguel Piñero, Wong’s friend and sometime lover. Attorney Street (Handball Court with Autobiographical Poem by Piñero), 1982-84, borrowed from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the Bronx exhibition, was the first work of Wong’s to be acquired by a major museum. It offers an inventory of the textual forms that Wong employed. A hand-printed passage from a Piñero poem is inscribed in the sky above a row of brick tenements. Below, a concrete wall in an asphalt playground is covered in flamboyant graffiti. Four rows of ASL hand signs appear to float over the blacktop. The entire composition is bounded by a trompe l’oeil frame decorated with a faux plaque inscribed with the lines Piñero spoke in the critically panned 1981 cop film Fort Apache: The Bronx: [pq]It is a highly romanticized version of a city that offers a zone of existential freedom even as it is beset with the multiple scourges of crack, heroin, crime, homelessness and AIDS.[/pq]“It’s the real deal, Neal. I’m going to rock your world make your planets twirl. Ain’t no wack attack.” The complex work features a catalogue of painting techniques, from linear perspective to decorative patterning. The various forms of writing and mark-making on display invite multiple modes of visual engagement, often melding reading and looking.  

Wong drew directly from his own life experiences to create paintings with an intimate, personal feel. One of the earliest works in the Bronx show is My Secret World 1978-81, from 1984, a composition some critics have connected to van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles (1889). This painting offers a glimpse through two tenement windows into Wong’s first residence in New York, a small room in the Meyer’s Hotel where he was employed as night watchman. The furnishings and decorations in the room add up to a symbolic self-portrait, though the artist is not visible. Above a single bed we see partially obscured representations of Wong’s own paintings of an eight ball, a pair of dice and a set of ASL hand signs spelling out a tabloid headline about the notorious serial killer Son of Sam. Through the other window we see a bureau stacked with books, the titles of which suggest Wong’s interest in everything from hockey to physics. A text inscribed on the outside window sill announces, “it was in this room that the world’s first paintings for the hearing impaired came into being.”

Wong’s art historical bent is also evident in Down for the Count (1985), which is not included in the Bronx show. The work depicts boxers and firemen in a composition that subtly recalls Goya’s The Third of May 1808 (1814). The prisoner before the firing squad in the Spanish master’s iconic work is transformed by [pq]Through these references to tragedy and violence, the artist imbues his ostensibly quotidian figures with heroic import while complicating the painting’s overt narrative of victory.[/pq]Wong into a boxer exulting in his victory over a supine sparring partner. Crouching on either side of the victorious figure, a pair of firemen hold the fallen fighter. The poses of the firemen, Wong’s notes reveal, are based on allegorical figures of sleep and death on a 6th-century b.c. Greek vase that he saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he worked in the bookstore. Through these references to tragedy and violence, the artist imbues his ostensibly quotidian figures with heroic import while complicating the painting’s overt narrative of victory.  

Similarly, Wong’s depictions of prison transform the institutions of incarceration into sites of erotic fantasy. These works are greatly indebted to Piñero’s writings and experiences as a convict. In contrast to the pervasive red of the urban landscapes, the backgrounds of the prison works share a predominantly white palette. Dark-skinned men recline suggestively in some of these scenes, assuming poses that recall 19th-century odalisques. In others, prisoners engaged in sexual encounters are glimpsed between bars. In The Annunciation According to Mikey Piñero (Cupcake and Pico), 1984, Wong references Renaissance depictions of the Annunciation, with the angel’s message from God to Mary reconfigured as an attempted seduction of one man by another.

By the 1990s, Wong had changed gears, perhaps under pressure from critics and curators to explore his Asian heritage, as Yasmin Ramirez suggested to me in a conversation at the press opening. As Lydia Yee, co-curator of the New Museum retrospective, put it in the catalogue for that 1998 show, Wong began producing works that “seemed to better fit a multicultural paradigm than their Lower East Side predecessors.” ²  These paintings, which could be understood as reflections on how Asian identity is constructed in popular culture, feature glitzy panoramas of the New York and San Francisco Chinatowns. As Yee argued, these works are more indebted to the orientalist stereotypes of 1930s movies than to anything Wong personally experienced in the 1990s. Accordingly, the paintings have a very different feel from his Loisaida works. They are gaudy and playful, [pq]These paintings, which could be understood as reflections on how Asian identity is constructed in popular culture, feature glitzy panoramas of the New York and San Francisco Chinatowns.[/pq]mingling depictions of the laughing, pot-bellied Hotei Buddha and other Asian spiritual motifs with depictions of Hollywood heroes like Bruce Lee and representations of historical figures, including a youthful version of his own aunt, who was Miss Chinatown in the 1930s. In contrast to the rectilinear geometry of his earlier works, these compositions are full of undulating lines, curling lotus forms, curved pagoda roofs and intricate chinoiserie patterns. 

These late works were featured prominently in Wong’s 1998 retrospective, and Cameron suggested they were key to his appeal at a moment of “increasing public interest in art that attempts to bridge cultural differences between disparate groups.” ³  However, many critics at the time found them less convincing than Wong’s earlier work. Barry Schwabsky, reviewing the show for this magazine, noted disapprovingly that Wong had “become something much more like a conventional Pop artist than he was before.” ⁴  

By the late 1990s, the decaying splendor of Wong’s Loisaida was quickly disappearing into memory, and the art that it spawned—by figures like Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz and Jean-Michel Basquiat—was being eclipsed by Conceptualist practices that offered cool, impersonal critiques of the media and consumer culture. As Marcia Tucker, the New Museum director at the time, noted, even Wong’s preferred medium—painting—was falling out of fashion.  

The renewed attention Wong’s work is receiving today comes in the context of widespread popular nostalgia for the gritty authenticity New York had before the economic boom transformed marginal neighborhoods like Loisaida into playgrounds for tourists, well-heeled students and Google millionaires. Wong’s work now strikes us as a time capsule, memorializing and romanticizing a bygone era. 

However, the rough image of urban life Wong conveyed is also steeped in self-conscious artifice. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, middle-class youth flocked to New York to mingle with the underclass they would [pq]The renewed attention Wong’s work comes in the context of widespread popular nostalgia for the gritty authenticity New York had before the economic boom transformed marginal neighborhoods into playgrounds for tourists and Google millionaires. [/pq]soon displace. Artists in Wong’s circle fetishized ruins, cultivated decadence and assumed the guise of outlaws. In a 1996 interview with Ramirez published for the first time in the current catalogue, Wong speaks about his life in the East Village and jokes about watching friends commit robberies, shoot up and talk about their prison experiences. 

But it is clear that Wong was more a voyeur than a participant in such rituals. A 1993 self-portrait, painted in the same style Wong used to render Asian movie icons, shows the artist sporting a cowboy hat, Fu Manchu mustache and embroidered Western shirt. Though this is one of the few works in which Wong depicted himself, what we see is more a persona than a true identity. Wong’s theatrical sensibility dates back to his days in San Francisco in the late 1970s, when he was involved with the Angels of Light performance troupe. In New York, Wong seems to have channeled this affinity for the stage into his paintings, creating setlike environments populated by figures—actors, really—who strike dramatic poses. Today, artifice, rather than social realism, is the most striking aspect of his work. As Wong noted in a 1991 talk in San Francisco, reprinted in the Wattis catalogue: “Basically in painting you have to fake things.” ⁵  

Of course, this pervasive artifice could be used to convey larger truths. Penitentiary Fox (1988), is a memorial to Piñero, who died of cirrhosis in 1988. The poet is painted before the closed doors of Sing Sing, the prison where he wrote and first staged his Pulitzer Prize–winning play Short Eyes (1974), while serving a sentence for armed robbery. Above prison gates lined with guards, the walls are cut away to reveal the inmates who were in the original cast. They are arranged in front of their cell block as if standing on a multitiered stage set. The entire prison is contained within a cartoonlike thought bubble: Piñero’s dream as reimagined by Wong.  

Canvases like this suggest that it is wrong to separate Wong’s prison and Loisada works from his Chinatown paintings. His visions of urban grit and prison life are as much works of the imagination as his Hollywood-style Chinatowns. Like any great storyteller, Wong took the materials of his life and world and wove them together into believable fictions. Because they spark our own fantasies, desires and memories, they continue to resonate today.

CURRENTELY ON VIEW “Martin Wong: Human Instamatic,” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, through Feb. 14.   

ELEANOR HEARTNEY is an A.i.A. contributing editor. 

Endnotes

1. Alia al-Sabi, Caitlin Burkhart and Julian Myers-Szupinska, My Trip to America by Martin Wong, San Francisco, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, California College of the Arts, 2015, p. 15.

2. Lydia Yee, “Martin Wong’s Picture Perfect Chinatown,” in Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong, New York, New Museum, 1998, p. 53.

3. Dan Cameron, “Brick by Brick: New York According to Martin Wong,” in Sweet Oblivion, p. 13.

4. Barry Schwabsky, “A City of Bricks and Cyphers,” Art in America, September 1998. p. 104.

5. Martin Wong, “It’s Easier to Paint a Store If It’s Closed,” in Painting is Forbidden, p. 92.

Stuart Comer is chief curator of media and performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He is co-organizing a Bruce Conner retrospective at MoMA and a Mark Leckey survey at MoMA PS1, both of which will open in 2016.

Comer recently spoke with A.i.A. about 10 of New York’s most noteworthy spaces, exhibitions and projects in 2015.

Studio Museum in Harlem

In anticipation of the Studio Museum’s expansion, they are closing this remarkable chapter of their history with a bang. “Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange,” “Lorraine O’Grady: Art Is. . .” and last year’s “Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974-1989” were among the outstanding exhibitions that set a higher standard than ever for the institution. Similarly, this year’s Studio Museum artists in residence—Eric Mack, Lauren Halsey and Sadie Barnette—suggest that the museum will continue to be one of the most vital incubators for artistic talent in the city.

Bronx Museum of the Arts

The Bronx Museum has become one of the most rewarding programs in New York, with exhibitions providing an essential archaeology of artists critical to rethinking the cultural history of New York and its shifting international position. “Jaime Davidovich: Adventures of the Avant-Garde” felt like justice had been served for a major media pioneer. Like the museum’s 2012 Juan Downey survey, it was a crucial show for considering important links between Latin America and New York during the 1970s. “Martin Wong: Human Instamatic” provided not only a rich focus on Wong’s painting practice, but surprising insights into the many communities he enriched. And “¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York,” a collaboration with El Museo del Barrio and Loisaida Inc., was a charged assessment of this key Puerto Rican collective. The exhibition felt more than urgent at a moment in which many artists are reconsidering the interface between their work and the city’s political life and economic conditions.

Bridget Donahue

Bridget Donahue’s gallery has been open a mere 10 months, but her program has already distinguished itself for its clever balance of spark, sass, rigor and commitment. Too many galleries and institutions “repurpose” historical figures to name-check superficial affinities with more recently launched artists. Donahue already has contributed enormously to the understanding of artists like Lynn Hershman Leeson and Susan Cianciolo, while providing foundational shows to emerging artists like Martine Syms and exposing artists previously underknown in this country, like London’s John Russell. The cumulative effect is one of integrity and complex historical continuity with subtle and surprising connections between artists.

Hito Steyerl, at Artists Space

There is no question that Hito Steyerl occupies a unique and singular position at the moment, both as a theorist and as an artist. The Berlin-based artist’s survey at Artists Space was one of the strongest arguments to date for her practice. Its stunning display beautifully articulated her interest in expanding the architectural and spatial dimension of her critical essay films. This was particularly true with Liquidity Inc. (2014), a meditation on Jacob Wood, a former Lehman Brothers analyst. Bathed in aquatic, chroma key blue, the installation dissolved any lingering boundaries between the virtual space of the screen and the surrounding world, prompting visitors to ride a wave of image and data flows that evoke the financial and ecological maelstroms of disaster capitalism.

“The Halprin Workshops, 1966-1971,” at Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, GSAPP, Columbia University

The Halprin workshops were a unique partnership between the avant-garde dance pioneer Anna Halprin and the leading American landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. Dance, architecture, movement, nature and manmade forms came together in powerful ways. The unique cross-disciplinary forum took place through workshops along the Northern California coastline. Geared towards encouraging collective practice and environmental awareness, the many innovations generated by the workshops remain central to the DNA of artists working today in dance and socially engaged practices. The Halprins now seem like missing links to a number of key developments of the past several decades, and this exhibition (organized by the Graham Foundation in conjunction with the architectural archives at the University of Pennsylvania) was a crucial step in articulating the intelligence and energy of their visionary approach to community and cultural ingenuity.

Judith Scott, at the Brooklyn Museum

“Judith Scott: Bound and Unbound” was the first major retrospective of Scott’s vivid, cocoon-like sculptures. Her works are magical time capsules, each beginning with a found object that became concealed and bound by the artist under layers and layers of vibrantly colored yarn. Each magnificent, mummified form feels like a word in a mysterious, coded language that Scott crafted over the 20 years that she produced work. Born with Down syndrome, she was deaf and never learned how to speak. After being institutionalized for over 35 years in Ohio, her deafness undiagnosed, she was brought by her twin sister Joyce Scott in the 1980s to the Bay Area. There she was enrolled in Oakland’s Creative Growth Art Center, a workshop founded for physically and developmentally disabled adults. The work that Scott produced there has incredible force, and in Brooklyn it was given the focus and context it richly deserves.

“Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau: A 21st Century Show Home,” at Swiss Institute

Last year the Swiss Institute launched the inaugural edition of its Annual Design Series with the wonderful “Fin de Siècle,” an exhibition curated by the Greek-Norwegian architect Andreas Angelidakis in homage to Eugène Ionesco’s 1952 play The Chairs. This year the second edition, curated by Felix Burrichter, suggests that the series will continue to be an unmissable affair. Burrichter is best known as the founding editor of the clever and irreverent design magazine PIN-UP. Riffing on Le Corbusier’s controversial Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, this survey of innovation in contemporary furniture design posed as a conceptual show home for the 21st century. Works by over 30 international designers and artists working with new technologies and production methods were organized in a range of domestic settings. Immersed in a green screen environment, visitors were instantaneously rendered within these settings on surrounding flat-screen televisions. The show was a cunning suggestion that the precarious confluence of surveillance and entertainment has radically transformed the sanctity of domestic space.

Raymond Roussel, at Galerie Buchholz

The launch of the Cologne and Berlin-based Galerie Buchholz’s first space in New York offered a rich introduction to the world of French writer Raymond Roussel that felt as timely as it was marvelously anachronistic. The luxuriously dense and rich display of material made it clear why so many artists continue to draw inspiration from Roussel. One vitrine in the show dedicated to Roussel’s travelogue Impressions of Africa (1910), made it particularly clear that a substantial reconsideration of the impact of Roussel’s work on Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia is long overdue.

Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the 21st Century, edited by Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter (MIT Press)

Among the many notable projects that Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter achieved this year—not least of which are the New Museum Triennial, which Cornell co-curated with Ryan Trecartin, and the ever-inspiring program at Light Industry, which Halter co-organizes with Thomas Beard—this book arguably will have the most enduring impact. The ambitious anthology relaunches the New Museum’s landmark series of critical readers originally initiated in the 1980s. Much as the original series was central to the discourse of the time, this volume provides an intelligent and coherent guidebook through which to gain critical perspective as we continue to navigate the seismic shifts of the digital world.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, at Sculpture Center

This introduction to the spectral world of Rasdjarmrearnsook highlighted the artist’s particular fascination with life, death and language. Among many artists at the moment working through notions about our encounter with nature, about ritual, about imminent death and destruction, Rasdjarmrearnsook’s work seems uniquely pointed and poignant.

Maximo Colon, Untitled, 1970, digital print.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday.

Today’s show: “¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York” is currently on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. The multi-venue exhibition (it continues at El Museo del Barrio and Loisaida Inc.) explores the radical social activist group The Young Lords and looks at how it was formed by Puerto Rican youths in the 1960s demanding reform. The exhibition feature 50 works that highlight the presence of women in the movement, the group’s struggle for the equal representation of Latinos in the media, and community actions in the South Bronx. The exhibition will be on view until October 18.

01

Caecilia Tripp, "Music for (prepared) Bicycles" Score Two New York, 2013, HD video.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

The Young Lords Organization, cover of Palante newspaper (Volume 2, Number 7, July 17, 1970), newsprint.

COURTESY TAMIMENT LIBRARY & ROBERT F WAGNER LABOR ARCHIVES, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Archeological Find #21: The Aftermath, 1961, destroyed sofa, wood, cotton, vegetable fiber, wire, and glue on wooden backing.

COURTESY BRONX MUSEUM, PURCHASED WITH FUNDS FROM THE FORD FOUNDATION

Sophia Dawson, Palante, 2015, acrylic and collage on canvas.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

Fred W. McDarrah, Pablo Guzman, Yoruba of the Young Lords, ca. 1968, vintage gelatin silver.

COURTESY BRONX MUSEUM, PURCHASED WITH FUNDS FROM THE FORD FOUNDATION

Maximo Colon, Untitled, 1970, digital print.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

Miguel Luciano, Machetero Air Force One's (Filiberto Ojeda Uptowns), 2007, vinyl and acrylic on sneakers.

COURTESY THE ARTIST