ESTAMOS BIEN - LA TRIENAL 20/21

El Museo del Barrio announces ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21, the museum’s first national large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art featuring more than 40 artists from across the United States and Puerto Rico. Curated by El Museo del Barrio’s Chief Curator Rodrigo Moura and Curator Susanna V. Temkin, with New York-based artist Elia Alba as Guest Curator, the show, which was originally planned for fall 2020, has been reconceived and expanded in light of the current moment. Now a yearlong initiative, the exhibition will debut this summer with online projects by artists Lizania Cruz, Xime Izquierdo Ugaz, Collective Magpie, Michael Menchaca, and Poncilí Creación. In spring 2021, the onsite exhibition will open in Las Galerías (Galleries) at El Museo del Barrio. Related public programs featuring curators, artists, invited scholars and other guests will take place throughout the year. 

ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21 is inspired by the critically acclaimed and historic The (S) Files exhibitions held at El Museo between 1999 and 2013, which provided a platform for emerging Latino and Latin American artists from the New York metropolitan region. Reconceived as a Triennial, the exhibition has expanded its scope to a national scale for the first time, including artists from California, Texas, Florida, Chicago, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, as well as from the Tristate Area. Utilizing an intersectional approach to Latinx identity, the Curatorial team has selected artists who represent a diversity of generations, genders, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. The full list of participating artists will be released in October 2020.

This first iteration of La Trienal borrows its title, ESTAMOS BIEN, from the work of participating artist Candida Alvarez, a former member of El Museo’s curatorial team in the 1970s and the only artist in the show with a previous exhibition history with the institution. Her painting Estoy Bien (2017) takes its title from the resilient and obliquely sarcastic response to the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Now pluralized, the phrase resonates with the present-day moment, as the works in the exhibition address issues of race and identity politics, gentrification and displacement, climate change, as well as the particular effects of the global pandemic to Latinx and other BIPOC populations. 
 

Online artist projects & schedule
Employing a hybrid approach, ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21 debuts this summer with a selection of online artist projects by selected exhibition artists: Lizania Cruz, Xime Izquierdo Ugaz, Collective Magpie, Michael Menchaca, and Poncilí Creación. Released between July and October, and fully accessible to the public, the digital projects span live performances; an interactive social platform; a photographic archive; a participatory survey; and video. The series begins on July 23 with Lizania Cruz’s Obituaries of The American Dream, a participatory project that considers how the ideal’s roots in individualism and hard work pertains to US society today, especially in the context of a pandemic. The project invites participants, locally and globally, non-im/migrants and im/migrants, to share testimonies of when and how the American Dream died for them. 

Obituary for the American Dream, Lizania Cruz
Launches July 23

Somxs Poder Seremos, Poncilí Creación
Live performance, August

Who Designs Your Race?, Collection Magpie
Launches September

Retratos, Xime Izquierdo Ugaz
Launches September

The Wall, Michael Menchaca
Launches October 

ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21 is made possible by the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation. Leadership support is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Generous funding is provided by the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, Tony Bechara, and La Trienal Council.