Nuyorican Movement - Visual Arts

Visual Arts

The Nuyorican Movement has always included a strong visual arts component, including arts education. Pioneer Raphael Montañez Ortiz established El Museo del Barrio in 1969 as a way to promote Nuyorican art. Painters and print makers such as Rafael Tufiño, Fernando Salicrup, Marcos Dimas, and Nitza Tufiño established organizations such as Taller Boricua. Writers and poets such as Sandra María Esteves and Nicholasa Mohr alternated and complemented their prose and lyrical compositions with visual images on paper. At other times, experimental artists such as Adal Maldonado (better known as Adál) collaborated with poets such as Pedro Pietri. During this time, the gay Chinese American painter Martin Wong collaborated with his lover Miguel Piñero; one of their collaborations is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the 1970s and 1980s, graffiti-inspired artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat achieved great recognition for their work. Installation artists such as Antonio Martorell and Pepon Osorio created (and continue to create) environments that bring together local aesthetic practices with political and social concerns. Since 1993, the Organization of Puerto Rican Artists (better known by its acronym O.P. Art) has opened a space for Puerto Rican visual artists in New York, particularly through its events at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center in the Lower East Side. More recently painters and muralists such as James De La Vega, Miguel Luciano and Sofia Maldonado have continued to expand and explore this tradition. The work of curators and museum directors such as Marvette Pérez, Yasmin Ramírez, Deborah Cullen, and Susana Torruella Leval has also contributed to this effort and helped Puerto Rican and Nuyorican art gain more recognition.