Pepón Osorio, Lonely Soul, 2009 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Who: Pepón Osorio, Bernardo Mosqueira, Margot Norton
What: Artist conversation
Where: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 235 Bowery at Prince St.
When: Thursday, September 14, $10, 6:30 (exhibition continues through September 17)
Why: “I’ve always been interested in people’s stories, always interested in somehow transforming my life through the lens of people’s experiences,” Puerto Rican artist Pepón Osorio says in a New Museum video about his stunning exhibition, “Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart/ Mi corazón latiente,” which continues through September 17.
When he moved from San Juan to what he refers to as the Republic of the South Bronx in 1975 at the age of twenty, Osorio learned English and about American culture. He worked for the Department of Social Services, visiting some four thousand homes, finding trouble, safety, and spirituality.
“What I was doing was collecting stories, collecting experiences, collecting the memory of what it was to be with all those families, and then translating them into an installation,” he says. “And I also saw myself not bearing the responsibility of a caseworker but that of an artist, trying to figure out a way to allow myself and the people that I work with to step back and look at the situation.”
The exhibition features large-scale environments that Osorio calls “the social architecture of communities.” No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop (En la barbería no se llora) is a barbershop filled with videos, hubcaps, a pool table, photos of Latino men, and a tableaux with a saint; the piece questions masculinity and faith within a dazzling space. (The piece was originally presented in a storefront, with people getting actual haircuts.) Badge of Honor pairs a boy’s bedroom, stuffed to the gills with baseball cards, sports posters, sneakers, and other items, next to a jail cell with only a toilet, a mattress, and one pair of sneakers; the boy and his imprisoned father, Nelson Gonzalez, communicate in poignant video projections.
Osorio worked with a real detective when putting together Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?), the inside of an elaborately detailed home where a murder has taken place, evoking how Latinos are portrayed in Hollywood films, particularly Fort Apache, the Bronx. Osorio re-creates the shuttered Fairhill Elementary in Philadelphia in ReForm, complete with videos of students’ reactions to the closure.
Inspired by Osorio’s own cancer treatment, Convalescence indicts the American health-care system; next to it, in the corner, is My Beating Heart (Mi corazón latiente), an oversized piñata-like heart that emits the sound of the artist’s own pumping organ. Osorio honors Amina Lawal, a Nigerian woman who was sentenced to death by stoning for adultery in 2002, in Lonely Soul, a shaved-ice cart held up by crutches, with religious elements and other key objects inside.
Pepón Osorio, My Beating Heart (Mi corazón latiente), 2000 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
On September 14 at 6:30, Osorio will be at the New Museum for a conversation with exhibition curators Margot Norton of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Bernardo Mosqueira of the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art; judging from their discussion in the catalog, it should be an enlightening event.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]