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El Museo del Barrio

Abstraccionistas

This grouping proposes a women-centered history of abstraction that exceeds rigid geographic and disciplinary boundaries. It features modern and contemporary artists working across varied mediums, such as hard-edge painting, textile, and ceramics.

Craft Crossroads

This grouping both foregrounds and challenges traditional approaches to craft by focusing on works that draw from community-derived techniques often gendered and excluded from hegemonic art history. Basketmaking and weaving, conventionally coded as feminine, are redeployed with sharp razor wire, while pastry decorating techniques are used to make subversive commentary on contemporary issues like policing and immigration.

El Barrio

This grouping honors and celebrates El Museo del Barrio’s neighborhood of El Barrio (also known as Spanish Harlem or East Harlem) in New York City, as well as the Latino and Nuyorican culture that has flourished there for generations. Through gestures at once whimsical and conceptual, the grouping of artworks illuminates vernacular artistic expressions and quotidian scenes from the neighborhood.

Figureheads

This grouping points to the ability of art, especially prints, to advance a political statement and a sense of self-identity. The artworks celebrate twin icons of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Movement—Lolita Lebrón and Pedro Albizu Campos, two leading activists who devoted their lives to fighting for Puerto Rican sovereignty and self-determination.

Figures and Craft Crossroads

This grouping features artists working within craft typologies to develop innovative approaches to the body. Nicaraguan artist Joel Gaitan looks to traditional hand-built clay potteryto create vessels of fashionable self-expression, while the signature inlaid leather technique of Puerto Rican-born artist Frank Diaz Escalet results in seductive forms of undulating figures. Through formal invention, both artists innovate a representational language that draws on historical and contemporary cultural referents. 

Making Unmaking

This pairing foregrounds two foundational figures within Nuyorican art history. Raphael Montañez Ortiz, one of the founders of El Museo del Barrio, is a celebrated artist whose “destructivist” works, such as the iconic 1969 Archaeological Find #22, epitomize the possibilities brought about by the process-based works of the late 1960s. Jorge Soto Sánchez is another emblematic Nuyorican artist whose assemblages draw on an Afro-Caribbean sensibility and are made from the urban detritus that formed the material basis of his artistic practice and that of Montañez Ortiz.

Ocama Aracoel One

The first grouping of Ocama Aracoel—“a call to the ancestors” in the Taíno language—focuses on the deep Taíno roots of many artists associated with the Puerto Rican diaspora. This grouping cuts across chronological boundaries, pairing works by artists dating back to the 1970s with a new work by Nuyorican artist Glendalys Medina that was recently commissioned by El Museo del Barrio for its multiyear, two-part collection survey Something Beautiful.

Ocama Aracoel Two

The second grouping of Ocama Aracoel—“a call to the ancestors” in the Taíno language—highlights how three Puerto Rican-born artists working in New York engaged with Taíno imagery through innovative painterly languages. Featuring the work of Rafael Colón Morales, Marcos Dimas, and Eloy Blanco, the grouping also offers a snapshot into the early history of El Museo del Barrio, which served as a gathering place for many artists to engage and experiment with Taíno cultural expression.

Tropical Extraction

This poignant pairing addresses the history of resource extraction in the Americas and the relationship of artists to this centuries-long process. Francisco Oller’s late nineteenth-century still life of a banana bunch epitomizes the identification of the Caribbean with bountiful tropical crops, ripe for extraction and exoticization. Justin Favela’s contemporary remix of Oller’s iconic painting doubles down on the fantasy by sardonically turning to the exuberant, stereotyped craft technique of traditional paper mâché piñata.

Pathos, Hope, Glory

This portraiture-themed pairing highlights the broad chronological and stylistic range withinEl Museo del Barrio’s collection. While the modernist portrait of a laundress by Rafael Tufiño evinces the artist’s commitment to represent often marginalized, everyday people with expressive paint application, the self-portrait by Antonio Cruz presents himself and his mother through the guise of one of the most cherished and moving depictions of divine maternity—Michelangelo Buonarroti’s late fifteenth-century Pietà.