Flux and Flow at El Museo del Barrio
Carlos Reyes, PROMESA (Caguas), 2024. Metal, lampshade, programmed lightbulbs. Photo by Sterling Corum.
Earlier this week, millions of Puerto Ricans rang in the new year in total darkness. LUMA, the privately owned electric company that controls Puerto Rico’s power grid, said in a statement the outage was likely caused by a failed cable from the southern part of the island, and as of Wednesday evening, power has been restored to more than 47% of homes. Since LUMA’s takeover, Puerto Ricans have protested the Canadian corporation’s monopoly on their power grid and the lack of support they’ve received in repairing infrastructure following Hurricane Maria in 2017. Partial outages are common, but this is the first blackout in years with no influence from extreme weather or natural disasters.
New York- and Puerto Rico-based artist Carlos Reyes represents his own juxtaposed power usage through two suspended IKEA light bulbs—the one representing New York glows constantly, while the other representing Puerto Rico flickers on and off. Reyes seeks to remind viewers of this injustice and is simultaneously paying homage by drawing attention to the 2016 legislative act PROMESA, the piece’s namesake, which attempted to aid Puerto Rico’s fiscal debt crisis. The piece is part of a larger discussion of culture and identity for the El Museo del Barrio’s current exhibition.
Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024 marks their second survey of contemporary Latinx art, encompassing the work of 33 artists working across the greater Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia. The collection shines in its ability to balance these loving creative feats against the complex and pressing struggles of the nations the artists represent. Flow States itself holds a dual meaning, challenging the porosity of the borders that separate and define us in our heritage. The artists included sought to challenge reputations, geographical borders, and the complexity of language, movement, and culture. The end result is a beacon of hope, understanding, reckoning, and pride.
Widline Cadet, Ant yè ak demen (Between Yesterday and Tomorrow), 2023. Archival inkjet print, single-channel video with sound, embedded screen, artist frame. Image courtesy of the artist and Nazarian / Curcio.
In the first portion of the exhibit, Widline Cadet’s stunning photography of Black figures and their silhouettes disappearing into the darkness is breathtaking. In Ant yè ak demen (Between Yesterday and Tomorrow), she’s intruded into this raucous, fleeting moment of joy in the consuming outdoors and preserved it. The photograph is superimposed by a short film displaying life through a simple, objective lens. A highway flare, a group of friends quietly docking a boat, the sun sinking between palm trees, women dancing with abandon poolside—each clip is a fraction of a moment, but together they represent a much more profound whole. The lived experience of these events is directly influenced by her Haitian background, but the splendor and joy within each moment feel universal.
Further down the hall, a commissioned installation from Maria A. Guzmán Capron is a vibrant visual sanctuary. A layer of thick, patterned fabric is strung across the wall, daring viewers to engage and reveal what’s behind it. After I struggled with the pulleys for a few minutes, the security guard behind me whispered, “the first one,” and winked, slipping away. I was left with the open tapestry’s brilliance alone. A face of fabric body parts and organic shapes smirked with content. The bench, Aquí para Ti, invites viewers to complete the piece by physically sitting within the masterpiece’s gaze. The invitation to move with the piece—pulling the ropes or taking a seat—and its organic shapes emphasize the femme energy at play and explore the boundaries between viewer and artwork.
Installation view of works by Maria A. Guzmán Capron. En Tu Mirada (In Your Eyes), 2024. Fabric, thread, batting, stuffing, silkscreen ink. Las Curlies, 2024. Fabric, thread, silkscreen ink. Aquí para Ti (Here for you), 2024. MDF, paint. Photograph by Matthew Sherman / Courtesy of El Museo del Barrio, New York.
Perpetual Renewal by Chaveli Sifre utilizes Little Trees Caribbean Colada car air freshener (with extras lining the walls of the room for viewers to take) to call out the way we commodify these cultures as tourists, consumers, leeches. A makeshift cruise terminal shopping center by Anina Major, In the Marketplace II, dissects a similar narrative of the commodification of culture via an ad for visiting the Bahamas. She splices the video at every point of controversy and makes text edits on-screen to correct the racist, objectifying, and often factually inaccurate dialogue. The video is set against a makeshift Nassau marketplace, complete with bananas, baskets of sisal, and a blinking “NO VACANCY” neon sign.
Installation view of Anina Major’s In the Marketplace II, 2024. Photograph by Matthew Sherman / Courtesy of El Museo del Barrio, New York.
This inequitable trade-off is punctuated through the exhibition’s critical examination of the less forgiving aspects of the same cultural backgrounds we have celebrated thus far. Several pieces challenge poverty, traditional family structures, and religion: the same things all of us are fighting over in every corner of the world. In Family Romance, Alina Perez exposes these wounds through a large graphite illustration that depicts a theatrically detailed and horrifying dreamscape. The pudgy fingers of a perverse man groping a young girl, and that same girl, hardened and older within the scene as a mother, standing in front of a pig roasting on a spit, that same wooden spear piercing her chest.
Christina Fernandez’s Suburban Nightscapes series are portraits of her son Diego that subvert negative sentiments of masculinity and force us to relate to him through the mundanity of American life. Despite his casual posture leaning against a fence whilst texting or chilling next to an outdoor fire pit with friends, through the eyes of his mother, he is not just the subject of a photograph but a star full of potential and on the cusp of greatness.
Installation view of Christina Fernandez’s Suburban Nightscapes series, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Luisotti, Los Angeles. Photograph by Matthew Sherman / Courtesy of El Museo del Barrio, New York.
Diego, this singular representation of the next generation, is carrying the message of the entire exhibition in his affable gaze across the garage workshop—transformation and progress is an intergenerational journey. These portraits of Diego are near the back wall in the second section of the exhibit, in an area of the museum where you have to pass through a small field of metal detectors to enter, and yet, they seem to convey the strongest message, one of both finality and hope.
Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024 will be on view at El Museo del Barrio until February 9, 2025.
