New York Fall Exhibition Preview

Courtesy The Bronx Museum of the Arts

Quisqueya Henríquez, “Bumpers” (2006)

NY Fall Exhibition Preview

El Museo’s Bienal: The (S) Files 007

El Museo del Barrio
July 25, 2007–Jan. 6, 2008

Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art

Brooklyn Museum
Aug. 31, 2007–Jan. 27, 2008

Here Is New York: Remembering 9/11/01

New-York Historical Society
Sept. 11, 2007–Jan. 1, 2008

Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country

The Jewish Museum
Sept. 16, 2007–Feb. 3, 2008

The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Sept. 18, 2007–Jan. 6, 2008

Richard Prince: Spiritual America

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Sept. 28, 2007–Jan. 9, 2008

Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love

Whitney Museum of American Art
Oct. 11, 2007–Feb. 3, 2008

Georges Seurat: The Drawings

Museum of Modern Art
Oct. 28, 2007–Jan. 17, 2008

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Found in Translation
El Museo del Barrio, the only museum in New York to focus exclusively on Latino and Latin American art, used to find itself with a felicitous problem: Every year hundreds of unsolicited artworks would appear on its doorstep.

What to do with them? In 1999 the museum decided to devote an annual show to exposing the best works from this unseen trove of local artists. In 2005 “The (S) Files” became a biennial. This year’s installment, on view through January 6, 2008, is the largest to date, with a total of 51 artists.

Working with E. Carmen Ramos of the Newark Museum, Elvis Fuentes of El Museo trolled through the archives and scouted beyond the submissions. “We have an archive here of hundreds of artists,” says Fuentes. The curators settled on 46 New York–based artists hailing from Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, and Brazil, as well as Latin American transplants from Israel, Paris, and Milan. An additional five from Ecuador, this year’s guest country, round out the group.

Among the works, Fuentes and Ramos saw common themes emerge. Some artists reference the hyperreality of the contemporary culture of violence and war, often in relation to the theme of masculinity. Javier Piñón, from Miami, created collages of cowboys hanging from chandeliers and balancing precariously on stacks of chairs, poking fun at an übermasculine archetype.

Labor, immigration, and identity also come up, as does a thread concerning language and communication. César Cornejo, from Peru, best captures the idea with a series of plain light bulbs. Those connected directly to an outlet shine the brightest, while those strung together grow dim. “I think it’s a beautiful metaphor about what is lost in translation,” Fuentes says. “It’s very beautiful and it’s very simple at the same time.”

Demystifying the Caribbean
This fall, Brooklyn, home to New York’s largest community of Caribbean-Americans, hosts the most important exhibition of contemporary art from the region since “Caribbean Art Now” at London’s Commonwealth Institute in 1986. "Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art,” on view through January 27, 2008, at the Brooklyn Museum, brings together more than 80 works made by 45 emerging and established artists within the past six years.

“Our mission is to represent cultural representations from across the world,” says Tumelo Mosaka, curator of the exhibition. “It’s an urgent message for us.” Not surprisingly, much of this message concerns the Caribbean nations’ shared legacy of colonialism. Jean-Ulrick Désert, a Haitian artist now dividing his time between New York and Berlin, draped four mannequins with the flags of former colonial powers for his installation Burqa Project: On the Border of My Dreams I Encountered My Double’s Ghost (2002). Hew Locke, who was raised in Guyana and now lives in London, fashioned El Dorado (2005), a dynamic sculpture of Queen Elizabeth II, from bits of metal, plastic, and other materials.

“All these artists have a sense of being fixed within a particular geographic location,” Mosaka notes. Yet they’re struggling to reshape identity in the face of stereotypes manufactured by the tourism industry and other sources, he says. “The tourist industry has pretty much portrayed an image of how we understand the Caribbean, so this exhibition, it tries to demystify that.”

A diptych series by Cuban-born Quisqueya Henríquez, who now lives in the Dominican Republic, contrasts the Caribbean ideal envisioned by tourists with the reality of poverty experienced by many residents of the islands. Her work can also be seen at the Bronx Museum’s “Quisqueya Henríquez: The World Outside,” the artist’s first major U.S. survey, through January 27, 2008.