Pasado y Presente: Art After the YLP 1969-2019
May 3rd – October 25th, 2019 – at Nathan Cummings Foundation
Exhibition catalogs are available, email info@loisaida.org
Pasado y Presente: Art After the Young Lords
The Loisaida Inc. Center in partnership with the Nathan Cummings Foundation, are pleased to announce the opening of Pasado y Presente: Art After the Young Lords, an exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Young Lords Organization in New York on view at the Nathan Cummings Foundation in 2019.
Active between 1969 and 1975, The Young Lords described themselves as a revolutionary party fighting for the liberation of all oppressed people. Their spectacular demonstrations, artful self-presentation, and masterful deployment of DIY media via their newspaper, Pa’lante, brought international attention to demands voiced in black and brown communities across the United States for cultural equity, equal rights for women and the LGBTQ population; communal control of housing, healthcare, education, sanitation; alternatives to methadone; and independence for Puerto Rico and other subjugated nations.
Spanning different generations, nationalities, and ethnicities, the artists displayed in Pasado y Presente represent a creative community that is connected to the Young Lords by their passion for art in the service of social justice and vanguard aesthetics. The work displayed here illuminates the influence that the Lords have had on activists and artists far beyond their six years as a formal organization. Featured in this exhibit are documentary photographs of Young Lords activism by Máximo Colón and Luis Carle and vintage posters from Taller Boricua, an East Harlem print collective that was allied with the Young Lords.
Additional artists on display include: AgitArte, Pepe Coronado, Sophia Dawson, Marcos Dimas, Hatuey Ramos Fermín, Miguel Luciano, Carlos Jesús Martínez Domínguez, Shellyne Rodríguez, Adrián Viajero Román, Juan Sánchez, Nitza Tufiño, Rafael Tufiño, and the VyC (Valor y Cambio) Machine, a retrofitted ATM device use to capture audio-visual testimony in exchange for local alt-currency. Presented at Loisaida Center, the VyC Machine distributed “Puerto Rican pesos” or Puerto Rican “bills” and in return, recorded live accounts and stories about what people value.
Pasado y Presente is be accompanied by a booklet and a related exhibition, published by Loisaida Center including works by AgitArte, Coronado Print Studio, Sherezade García, and Valor y Cambio exploring migration, movement, inter diasporic Caribbean identity in NYC, alternative economies, story-telling and decolonial narratives.
On Sunday, May 26, several participating artists in Pasado y Presente took part in interactive urban interventions during the annual Loisaida Festival. Additionally, Nathan Cummings and the Loisaida Center will host a series of public programs investigating topics such as history and influence of the Young Lords in New York, feminist and LBGTQ activism in Latinx communities, cultural production and organizing in Puerto Rico post-Maria, the intersection of environmental justice with anti-displacement efforts in NYC’s poor and working class neighborhoods. Download Press Release here.
Related Exhibition Programming:
The Liquid Highway is a participatory printmaking workshop that celebrates movement and migration developed by artist, Scherezade Garcia.
A site-specific interactive installation of marine landscapes on inner tube material presented as scrolls. This urban intervention and printmaking workshop honors our shared collective history and the commitments we have to one another. Through the act of printmaking, the public will have the opportunity to print a section of the landscape and own their own piece of this complex history.
New York City Launch at Loisaida Inc. Center, September 2019
Valor y Cambio (#valorycambio) is an art, storytelling, and solidarity economy project started by the artists Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Sarabel Santos Negrón. It raises the question of what Puerto Ricans value as a society and introduces a community currency—pesos of Puerto Rico—as a means of change, in the sense of both money and social transformation.
After its successful launch in Puerto Rico, the community currency interactive project made its NYC debut during the 2019 Loisaida Festival.
