Street Life

Queer Activism, Performance, and Joy

The Photography of Luis Carle

In this exhibition, the noted New York Puerto Rican photographer Luis Carle honors the street—the work of protest, resistance, remembrance, critical gender performance, and celebration with which queer subjects have infused public spaces, transforming them. Inspired by the Nuyorican street activist Sylvia Rivera, who advocated for radical, gender non-conforming, intersectional queer communities; Cristina Hayworth, founder of Puerto Rico’s LGBTQ Pride March; the gender performance artist Oswaldo Gómez, Ms. Colombia, who converted city streets into his backstage dressing-room for “cosmically” reimagining everyday life; and Dirty Martini, whose witty performances critique commercialization and gentrification at a time of imperiled queer civil rights; Carle invites the viewers to join the crowd, march, walk, ride, dance and put their bodies on the line. Moving from images of the legendary marches on Washington for LGBTQ civil rights, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, ACT-UP activism, and the NYC Drag March to everyday street performances, performance art, and celebrations, Carle’s photographs ask us to reflect on how protest, performance, memorialization, and joy have historically built on each other in queer popular cultures.

Luis Carle (b. 1962) is a New York-based Puerto Rican photographer living in New York City since the 1980s. He studied photography at Parsons School of Design. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), El Museo del Barrio, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in San Juan, and the Paul Robeson Gallery at Rutgers University in Newark. Carle was the founding director of O.P.Art, the Organization of Puerto Rican Artists, from 1992 to 2013. His work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, and The Museum of the City of New York.