Liliana Porter: Other Situations / Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography

El Museo del Barrio is excited to reopen its Galleries to the public after a year-long renovation with its Fall 2018 exhibitions: Liliana Porter: Other Situations, organized by SCAD Museum of Art (SCAD), and curated by Humberto Moro, SCAD Curator of Exhibitions, and Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography, organized by E. Carmen Ramos, the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM)’s deputy chief curator and curator of Latino art.

“We are excited to inaugurate our new and improved Galerias this fall with two exceptional exhibitions that present diverse, complex, and thoughtful perspectives of our communities,” said Patrick Charpenel, Executive Director, El Museo del Barrio. “In collaboration with SCAD we will present Argentinian artist Liliana Porter’s first museum solo show in New York City in more than 25 years as well as an incredible group show, Down These Mean Streets, organized by SAAM, that beautifully depicts and acknowledges the daily realities of our urban communities, including our neighborhood of El Barrio.”

Liliana Porter: Other Situations is a non-linear survey of Porter’s work from 1973 to 2018, which explores the conflicting boundaries between reality and fiction, and the ways in which images are circulated and consumed. The exhibition highlights the fundamental distinction that Porter creates between the notions of “narrative” and “situation” in contrast to the structures implicit in most stories that suggest a relationship with time, and in which the artist is not interested. In her work, the past and the future of an action becomes irrelevant in light of the urgency and the absurdity of the problems faced by the figures portrayed. Sometimes paired in conversation or arranged in larger groups, Porter’s characters—a pantheon of cultural figures such as Elvis Presley, Che Guevara, Jesus, Micky Mouse and Benito Juárez—evokes questions about representation, image dissemination and public life, and are particularly relevant in present times, when the fields of politics, spectacle and celebrity culture collide and merge. Among the significant pieces included in the exhibition are Porter’s 1970s photographs alluding to space and the body, and more recent works like the “Forced Labor” series, in which the artist utilizes miniature figurines to make a statement about reality, labor and self-awareness.

​THEM, a live performance
October 25–26, 2018 at The Kitchen, New York
Co-directed by artists Liliana Porter and Ana Tiscornia with music by Sylvia Meyer, and making its theatrical debut in the United States at The Kitchen, THEM questions the conventions through which we perceive things, and offers an invitation to recreate narratives beyond our expectations. Presented by El Museo del Barrio, the SCAD Museum of Art, and The Kitchen.

Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography explores the work of ten photographers—Manuel Acevedo, Oscar Castillo, Frank Espada, Anthony Hernandez, Perla de Leon, Hiram Maristany, Ruben Ochoa, John Valadez, Winston Vargas, and Camilo José Vergara—who were driven to document and reflect on the state of American cities during post-World War II. Rather than approach the neighborhoods as detached observers, these artists deeply identified with their subject. Activist and documentary photographer Frank Espada captured humanizing portraits of urban residents in their decaying surroundings. Hiram Maristany and Winston Vargas lovingly depict street life in historic Latino neighborhoods in New York City, offering rare glimpses of bustling community life that unfolded alongside urban neglect and community activism. Working in Los Angeles, Oscar Castillo captured both the detritus of urban renewal projects and the cultural efforts of residents to shape their own neighborhoods. Perla de Leon’s poignant photographs of the South Bronx in New York—one of the most iconic blighted neighborhoods in American history—place into sharp relief the physical devastation of the neighborhood and the lives of the people who call it home. John Valadez’s vivid portraits of stylish young people in East Los Angeles counter the idea of inner cities as places of crime. Camilo José Vergara and Anthony Hernandez adopt a cooler, conceptual approach in their serial projects, which return to specific urban sites over and over, inviting viewers to consider the passage of time in neighborhoods transformed by the urban crisis. The barren “concrete” landscapes of Ruben Ochoa and Manuel Acevedo pivot on unconventional artistic strategies such as the merging of photography and drawing, to inspire a second look at the physical features of public space that shape the lives of urban dwellers. 
 

El Museo del Barrio Hours
Wednesday-Saturday 11am–6pm, Sunday 12-5pm