Pepón Osorio is an internationally recognized artist whose installations challenge the stereotypes and misconceptions that shape our view of social institutions and human relationships. This book shows that although Osorio draws on his Puerto Rican background and the immigrant experience for inspiration, his artistic statements bridge geographical barriers and class divides.
An exploration of the visual culture of “race” through the work of five contemporary artists who came to prominence during the 1990s. Over the past two decades, artists James Luna, Fred Wilson, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Pepón Osorio, and Renée Green have had a profound impact on the meaning and practice of installation art in the United States. In Subject to Display, Jennifer González offers the first sustained analysis of their contribution, linking the history and legacy of race discourse to innovations in contemporary art. Race, writes González, is a social discourse that has a visual history. The collection and display of bodies, images, and artifacts in museums and elsewhere is a primary means by which a nation tells the story of its past and locates the cultures of its citizens in the present. All five of the American installation artists González considers have explored the practice of putting human subjects and their cultures on display by staging elaborate dioramas or site-specific interventions in galleries and museums; in doing so, they have created powerful social commentary of the politics of space and the power of display in settings that mimic the very spaces they critique. These artists' installations have not only contributed to the transformation of contemporary art and museum culture, but also linked Latino, African American, and Native American subjects to the broader spectrum of historical colonialism, race dominance, and visual culture. From Luna's museum installation of his own body and belongings as “artifacts” and Wilson's provocative juxtapositions of museum objects to Mesa-Bains's allegorical home altars, Osorio's condensed spaces (bedrooms, living rooms; barbershops, prison cells) and Green's genealogies of cultural contact, the theoretical and critical endeavors of these artists demonstrate how race discourse is grounded in a visual technology of display.
From Ferdinand Chevel's Palais Ideal (1879-1905) and Simon Rodia's Watts Towers (1921-1954) to Ant Farm's Cadillac Ranch (1974) and Richard Serra's Tilted Arc (1981), installation art has continually crossed boundaries, encompassing sculpture, architecture, performance, and visual art. Although unique in its power to transform both the site in which a work is constructed and the viewer's experience of being in a place, installation art has not received the critical attention accorded other art forms. In Space, Site, Intervention, some of today's most prominent art critics, curators, and artists view installation art as a diverse, multifaceted, and international art form that challenges institutional assumptions and narrow conceptual frameworks. The contributors discuss installation in relation to the genealogy of modern art, community and corporate space, multimedia cyberspace, public and private ritual, the gallery and the museum, public and private patronage, and political action. This ambitious volume focuses on issues of class, sexuality, cultural identity rase, and gender, and highlights a wide range of artists whose work is often marginalized by mainstream art history and criticism. Together, the essays in Space, Site, Intervention investigate how installation resonates within modern culture and society, as well as its ongoing influence on contemporary visual culture.
Since the 1960s, Nuyorican poets have explored and performed Puerto Rican identity both on and off the page. Emerging within and alongside the civil rights movements of the 1960s, the foundational Nuyorican writers sought to counter the ethnic/racial and institutional invisibility of New York City Puerto Ricans by documenting the reality of their communities in innovative and sometimes challenging ways. Since then, Nuyorican poetry has entered the U.S. Latino literary canon and has gained prominence in light of the spoken-word revival of the past two decades, a movement spearheaded by the Nuyorican Poetry Slams of the 1990s. Today, Nuyorican poetry engages with contemporary social issues such as the commodification of the body, the institutionalization of poetry, the gentrification of the barrio, and the national and global marketing of identity. What has not changed is a continued shared investment in a poetics that links the written word and the performing body. The first book-length study specifically devoted to Nuyorican poetry, In Visible Movement is unique in its historical and formal breadth, ranging from the foundational poets of the 1960s and 1970s to a variety of contemporary poets emerging in and around the Nuyorican Poets Cafe “slam” scene of the 1990s and early 2000s. It also unearths a largely unknown corpus of poetry performances, reading over forty years of Nuyorican poetry at the intersection of the printed and performed word, underscoring the poetry’s links to vernacular and Afro-Puerto Rican performance cultures, from the island’s oral poets to the New York sounds and rhythms of Latin boogaloo, salsa, and hip-hop. With depth and insight, Urayoán Noel analyzes various canonical Nuyorican poems by poets such as Pedro Pietri, Victor Hernández Cruz, Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, Sandra María Esteves, and Tato Laviera. He discusses historically overlooked poets such as Lorraine Sutton, innovative poets typically read outside the Nuyorican tradition such as Frank Lima and Edwin Torres, and a younger generation of Nuyorican-identified poets including Willie Perdomo, María Teresa Mariposa Fernández, and Emanuel Xavier, whose work has received only limited critical consideration. The result is a stunning reflection of how New York Puerto Rican poets have addressed the complexity of identity amid diaspora for over forty years.
"What will we leave for future generations? What is it about a community that might inspire a work of art? Can that art give meaning to our public spaces?" "The artists and communities participating in the program New Land Marks: Public Art, Community, and Meaning of Place have been grappling with these challenging questions. The resulting book documents how a long-standing Philadelphia cultural organization - the Fairmount Park Art Association - initiated this program in order to plan and create unique public art projects with communities that volunteered to participate. Artists have been working with these communities to incorporate public art into ongoing community development, urban greening, civic history, streetscape enhancement, and other revitalization initiatives. The resulting proposals - which represent "works in process" - celebrate community identity, commemorate "untold" histories, inspire civic pride, respond to the local environment, and invigorate public spaces. This book is a guide for those interested in how communities and artists can examine the appearance and meaning of public spaces." "In addition to illustrating the work of the twenty-one artists participating in this innovative public art project, the book includes essays by noted authors Ellen Dissanayake, Thomas Hine, Lucy Lippard, and Penny Balkin Bach, Executive Director of the Fairmount Park Art Association, who also served as general editor."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This book looks at art made and exhibited in New York over the course of one year, providing a synchronic panorama in which established artists and emerging figures of the time are presented alongside the work of authors whose influence has since faded from the discussion. Centering on the year 1993, the exhibition is conceived as a time capsule, an experiment in collective memory that attempts to capture a specific moment at the intersection of art, pop culture, and politics. The exhibition draws its subtitle from the eponymous album that the New York rock band Sonic Youth recorded in 1993 and captures the complex exchange between mainstream and underground culture across disciplines, which came to define the art of the era. The New Museum's exhibition will include a number of historical reconstructions of important installations and exhibitions from 1993, while other works will be revisited and reinterpreted from the vantage point of today, highlighting the ways in which certain actions, events, attitudes, and emotions reverberate towards the present. These works will sketch out the complex intersection between art and the world at large that defined the 1990s and continues to shape artistic expression today.
