Pepón Osorio is known for his provocative, large scale multimedia installations that merge conceptual art and community dynamics. Osorio has worked with over twenty-five communities across the United States and internationally, creating installations based on their real-life experiences. On the occasion of Osorio’s exhibition, Convalescence, at the Thomas Jefferson University medical campus in Philadelphia, we recorded a conversation on the New Social Environment (Episode #1084). We discussed the artist’s early days in New York, how his job as a caseworker at the Department of Human Services influences his artwork, and why he thinks of his final installation as “the debris of the process.” The following text is a version of that conversation that has been edited for print.
Dan Cameron (Rail): I’ve known your work, Pepón, for a touch over three decades. One of the things I find fascinating about the moment when you came to our attention—and by “our” I’m speaking collectively, us New Yorkers in the art world—it was a moment when performance, video, and installation were very much the lingua franca of the art world. And a lot of that work was coming from a base in conceptual art, and was more experimentally oriented. Your work was very different. It had a quality to it that was more about emotion, feelings, and pathos. Can you take us back to the early years of your work, and give a little bit of a description of the context that your work first came out of and led to? I’m thinking of your unforgettable 1995 installation, Badge of Honor.
Pepón Osorio: During the eighties, I had more friends in the performance field than in the visual arts. That was because of Merián Soto, who I collaborated with for many, many years, and who is my wife and lifetime partner. I was working as a case worker at the Human Resources Administration in New York City, working with families and with clients who suffered child abuse and neglect. Merián lived on Canal Street, the corner of Canal and West Broadway. So my day was coming from the Bronx to work on Lafayette Street, then go and hang out with Merián on West Broadway and Canal Street. She had a loft, and we became close friends. That sparked the process, sparked my curiosity, and I started to make a right on West Broadway and began to look at the galleries.
Rail: By pure happenstance, pure serendipity?
Osorio: Absolutely. And curiosity and accessibility, because they were right there. And what I saw made me wonder about the experience I had with my family. My mother’s a baker, and all that three-dimensionality that I was seeing reminded me of my mother’s cakes, the ones that she baked for sweet-sixteens and weddings and all the important events in the neighborhood. Somehow, somewhere, Merián and I began to collaborate. I wasn’t even thinking about becoming an artist until I was admitted to Columbia University in the eighties. I lost track of the specific date. So that experience brought me to understand and to see the possibilities in the art outside of what had been established.
Rail: So, if I can paraphrase slightly, your first experience with contemporary art and installation and video and performance—all that links in your memory to these personal experiences that were already deeply meaningful and intimate for you?
Osorio: Absolutely. At that time I was also looking at Walter De Maria’s The Broken Kilometer (1979) at Dia on West Broadway. I understood there was a metaphor behind his installation, that there was a possibility to connect with things that real life didn’t offer. So I began to develop this concept, and we performed at PS1 in 1985 in the Spring Dance Series—that was the first big collaboration that Merián and I did.
I treated that installation, and that performance as if it was a quinceañera, you know, almost like a wedding. I just went all the way with it, and the more that I was getting into that process, the more I realized that I was bringing with me the reality that I had as a caseworker in the Department of Human Services. There was no disassociation.
Rail: So it’s your experience as a caseworker with your clients that first led to that emotional connection. As you mentioned, you’ve got your own family and personal history rolled into your work too, because one thing is triggering memories of other things. It’s like a madeleine for Proust; you experience a certain texture, a certain color, and suddenly you’re at a different moment in your own life.
Osorio: I have never been able to distance myself from others. Usually the more I think something is about the other, it’s actually about me—because I’m seeing through the lens of other people.
Rail: Let’s put this in the context of your work. Can you talk about the early piece, En la barbería no se llora (No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop) from 1994?
Osorio: The installation No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop came from an experience I had growing up as a boy of African descent. My father was so proud of me, and he wanted to send me to get the first haircut, but he took me to a barber who did not know how to cut kinky hair. I realized that in the entire space, as I was becoming more and more aware, I was absorbing all the imagery that was in the barbershop, and it made perfect sense. I connected that to manhood, and to the distortion of masculinity, which is machismo. And then I brought it together in this installation. It’s an homage to my father, and in the oval mirror there’s an image of him. That connection to everything else made perfect sense, not only to me, but to a lot of other young men who grew up with this kind of super macho role model. Needless to say, I embarrassed my father by just crying my eyeballs out during the haircut. That’s how it happened. So fast forward many, many years, and, remember, my work is also based on memory. I remember all of that experience vividly, and I just wanted to bring it out, let it out of my psyche.
Rail: Another thing that’s amazing for a New Yorker—removing you as the author of the piece and just talking about my experience—I’ve lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan since 1979. It’s an overwhelmingly Hispanic neighborhood, mostly Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Colombian. The barbershop always had this special relationship to the block and it functioned as a social center for many neighbors. We see it in movies, representing Black culture, and so what I felt when I first walked into No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop was that I’m re-entering a space that I already know, that I see all the time, that I pass every day. It’s a place that’s part of my own neighborhood, which I was in the process of trying to become part of, and your piece became a sort of portal. You could be intimate with the objects, the figures and the frames, and you didn’t have to worry about being in an actual barbershop, where nobody would ever let you carry on like that.
Osorio: I also want to add that there is tension in the work, because as contradictory as it might sound, I wanted it to look more like a beauty parlor than a barber shop. I live in an environment, a community, where women are the leaders of the households. And so the minute that you walk into the living room, everything has been programmed, determined, and envisioned by women. I wanted to somehow make that a point in No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop and in Badge of Honor. Rather than close it down to the men, I wanted the work to open up to everyone, and especially to those women who have not had the opportunity to be acknowledged.
Rail: So, it’s a gender hybrid?
Osorio: Yeah, absolutely.
Rail: I didn’t see that the first time. But now that you’re pointing it out, it’s very clear.
Osorio: So after the barbershop, I spent time thinking about the exhibition in the context of a storefront. I realized that a lot of people were coming in to see the work, but we were giving very specific hours, like that of museums. And I realized that the places where my work was shown were completely different from a museum, and people operated differently. Badge of Honor is the beginning of connecting to a world apart from museum culture. It’s the first time I gave myself freedom not to replicate the museum or replicate the traditional exhibition space, but to connect with the immediate environment and see what works. So the hours of operations were twelve to seven. That’s where I saw the most traffic, and it was closed Sundays and Mondays.
Badge of Honor is the relationship of these two men, a father and son. I went with a slide carousel of my work to lots of prisons and I showed the earlier slides of my work to the guys, because I was looking to make some sort of a connection with a father.
I don’t know if anyone remembers, but Badge of Honor was in 1995 which was the time of the Million Man March. And I really wanted to connect with the men who were in prison. I wanted to do a piece, but I wasn’t sure what. In most of my work, I don’t know what to do. The barbershop piece stayed in my mind for I don’t know how many years, and then Badge of Honor was probably in my brain for ten years. When they eventually come out, I know exactly what I want to work with, and what I want to do. I never solicit others to work with. Usually, people come to me. I’ve always said that there’s stories around and I’m just waiting for them to land.
Rail: So how many prisoners did you visit until one proposed that you work together?
Osorio: About ten. I went around and this man came over, and he said, you know, “I’m an artist, and I want to work with you.” And we began a conversation. I told him, I don’t want it to be all about you. You have to convince your son to take part too. I still did not know what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to work with two people, and one would be his son. So for about a month and a half, I went from the son’s house to the prison cell once a week.
I began the conversation with one word. I had the camera on my shoulder, and I asked the son to respond to one word, like “freedom.” And he went on talking about freedom. Then I said “absence,” and he talked about absence. And each time I recorded with the son, I went to the father and played what the son had to say, and vice versa. By the second time, I didn’t have to tell them a word, it had already been said, and they just went back and forth. The recording was an endless process, and I edited it down to 17–18 minutes.
Rail: I have never experienced a work that struck me at an emotional level as deeply as Badge of Honor. You must hear countless accounts of people weeping as they begin to listen to this dialogue. A lot of men have issues around their fathers having abandoned them, or their fathers being taken away from them. So this gap that you filled in—it’s love, but it’s also suffering—it just goes back and forth, and you can’t decide which is more unbearable.
Osorio: Thank you Dan. And with this work, you’re standing there, and it becomes a triangular relationship. There’s a connection between the father and son, the father and you, and the son and you—and those three connections create a triangle, and you are implicated as a viewer.
Rail: You’re also getting to experience what neither of them can experience, which is the presence of the other. In a way, you are experiencing your own privilege, because you’re experiencing their conversation in a way that was never possible for them.
Osorio: Right. You see what you want to see, and what you are able to see, both spiritually and physically, mentally and emotionally. I’m experiencing that now more than ever with my new piece, Convalescence. In most of the work that I do, I become so engaged with the people I’m collaborating with that we do everything in one take. This was also the case with Convalescence.
Rail: It’s an amazing level of trust that the father and son placed in you to be able to open themselves up as they do, maybe more even than if the other person had been present in the room. It’s very powerful in part because they do it via you as a conduit. Let’s talk about what you’re doing in Philadelphia.
Osorio: Convalescence is at the Thomas Jefferson University medical campus in Philadelphia, where I live. Actually, I persuaded them, and then they invited me. This is not a simple matter and process. I was diagnosed with cancer six years ago, and started to go to chemotherapy, and heard many stories. Again, I have this “quality,” I guess you could call it, where people come to me and tell me their stories. So I was in the chemotherapy waiting room, and people would just sit next to me and begin to tell me their stories. And the truth is, I panicked. I never wanted to connect, because I was trying to deal with my own healing process. And then one day, I woke up and said to myself, “I have to do something about it.” I came up with the idea of convalescence. Once you’re diagnosed with any illness, you will forever be in a state of convalescence. You may get better physically, but mentally and spiritually you are in a state of convalescence. So this idea that you will never be the same began to grow in my mind.
One of the key objects in the installation is a hamburger cart this guy gave me. We started to talk, and became comfortable with each other. He talked about his illness and how he wanted to quit his job. And I just thought that was interesting, and wanted to do a piece about that, and that was the very beginning, the seed of everything else.
Rail: I’m struck by something that you kind of went past a bit quickly, that these were all stories you didn’t want to hear. When they came to you the first time, you weren’t ready. And one day you woke up and everything was different. Do you have any thoughts about that moment?
Osorio: Absolutely. When stories are given to me, I have to be in alignment—physically, mentally and spiritually—to accept them. During that time, I was not, so I couldn’t commit to any of this work. And it got to the point where everything began to line up, and I started to think that it was possible to tell the story the right way, respectfully, by channeling people’s stories through my work.
Rail: And it was partly a result of your own treatment?
Osorio: Absolutely, and I want to tell you a little bit about the ironic role that flowers and people play in healing. At the very beginning of the installation, you see this big arrangement of flowers, and it captures the irony of Get Well cards, the commercialization and overproduction of caring and wanting people to care. Sometimes when we find out that someone is sick, we don’t know what to do, so we go and get flowers, right? And that is one side of it.
As you come into the space, there’s a scale on an aluminum platform. It really tells my own story about how I found out that there was something wrong with my body. You see the flowers, you look at the cabinet with a lot of self-prescribed medication, which is another crisis that we have. I put all my MRIs, all my PET scans—everything that I have in terms of documentation from my process were enlarged and hung on these giant walkers.
I came across some wonderful people who wanted to work with me. They are in chronic pain and I just left the camera on, and recorded them during the time of the day when they felt most affected by their pain. You see their images, eight feet by four feet, in slow motion, then you walk in and you begin to see the stories as I had been told. I spent about a year and a half with each subject, and they told me the story of what happened to them. One particular piece in Convalescence is about an African American woman. Thirty percent of Black women are neglected or mistreated by the medical system during their pregnancy, and their birth process is more difficult due to hospital neglect. At the very beginning it says, “I mattered, she mattered, and it could have been prevented.” What I’m trying to do here is bring the family’s voices into the conversation. When I talk to people, images are built. Everything becomes like a metaphor, and I translate their stories into the work, similar to the way that it was told to me.
Rail: So you go from story to story?
Osorio: You go from room to room, and each room is particular. The only connection is the giant pill bottles. I placed the figure of the person—made with latex—inside of the pill bottle, referencing the ongoing profits of pharmaceutical companies. For example, one of the women who I worked with is on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. We talked about how impatient she was to find out where on the waiting list she was. It wasn’t at the very top, nor in the middle, but somewhere towards the bottom. There’s a lot of people ahead of her, and that translates into people lined up on the sides of her bed.
In the hospital, they wake you up at a certain time and they put everyone to sleep at a certain time. I wanted to translate that in the video as well. So you see everyone sleeping, and then everybody wakes up in unison. Something that caught my attention is that when you are diagnosed with a very critical illness, you want to believe that it’s not true, that somehow it’s a dream, and you’re not living reality. You just want to disappear in that fantasy, and so everybody was talking about their dreams as if they were real, and their reality as if it were a dream.
Rail: How many stories, how many individuals?
Osorio: Including myself, five. The beauty of it is that all these people came to the opening, because their families stepped in and arranged it. The subjects came, and sat there in their part, and they looked at each other, and somehow I began to connect to this idea that they were visiting themselves in the hospital.
Rail: They were meeting each other, and sort of meeting themselves—
Osorio: They were meeting themselves when they stood in front of themselves. And it was wonderful, because not only are they looking at their story, but they are also looking at how I was able to tell the story. Here I am again, telling someone else’s story from a place that I know well, because I’ve been there.
Rail: The installation took place in the lobby, correct?
Osorio: Yes, and the wall that faces the street is glass, so you can see the installation from outside and inside. It’s in a medical environment, so you get to see the people that come in with canes, walkers, and wheelchairs. You’re standing inside, and you see an entire community of people outside feeling exactly the same thing that you’re feeling inside. It's the first time that has ever happened.
Rail: Have you envisioned a way that this project can continue to exist after it leaves the hospital corridor? I mean, this isn’t a gallery. This is a different kind of a public space that you’ve transformed.
Osorio: For me, it’s about opening up the spaces in the neighborhoods where I think the audience needs to see the work first. Had I put this work in a museum, everyday people would have missed it. It’s kind of a joke, but it’s a serious one with Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?) (1993), which was at the Whitney Biennial. A big photograph of the Scene of the Crime came out in the Arts & Leisure section of the Times, and it took up half the page. It was a Sunday morning, so I went to my next door neighbor, who had worked with me on the piece, and I said, “Luisa, look, we made it to the New York Times!” And Luisa looked at me, and looked at the newspaper, and looked at me, and said, “Pepón, what the hell is the New York Times?”
I realized I was creating this work in a vacuum for the people who are not museum-goers. No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop was the very first one I created in a context outside of the museum. I think after it has been in the appropriate neighborhood, then it can go into the museum.
Rail: How long will it be visible in Philadelphia?
Osorio: The work is up until November first. It’s interesting, my work, because it ran very quiet for the first week and a half, and then it started picking up. And I’m just patiently waiting for that to happen.
Rail: Can you talk about the building-models in the exhibition?
Osorio: There are two models, the architectural model of the building and the architectural model for the botánica nearby. There are a few botánicas in North Philadelphia, and I wanted it to mirror that. When you walk into the space, you see the image of the guy who gave a lot of money and who the building is named after. And the group on the right, in a very similar frame, are the forgotten workers from Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. I wanted to balance the environment, so that it wasn’t only leaning into the people who have a lot of money and access, but opening up the possibility for other things to happen.
Rail: Would you devote a minute to a brief description of a botánica?
Osorio: Sure, a botánica is the place where we seek spiritual healing and for remedies. It is the place where our grandmothers went for knowledge for healing and prevention. What I’m trying to say is that because of the monopolization of health and medication that hospitals have, they have taken away our known traditions, and given our lives over to the medical field.
Rail: The model was created for the exhibition?
Osorio: Yes, specifically for the exhibition. I had a situation with a doctor, and I said to him, “you went to medical school, and I believe you, but I’ve been carrying my body for sixty-nine years, so you don’t know more than me about my body.” It becomes a completely different discussion from then on, which is the premise and the essence of the installation. We know how much we know, but it’s constantly negated because we have given ownership of our bodies to the medical field, as if we don’t know anything at all.
Rail: Was this something you went into the project feeling? Or was it something where, once your own treatments were finished and you were convalescing, something clicked in terms of inverse proportionality?
Osorio: Yes, but it was also in relationship to what other people in the families told me. Because at some point I just thought: am I giving everyone a hard time around here? And then I realized that they were feeling the same way as me. Some of them said, “Every time I come, they tell me something different, and I’m still stuck where I am” or “They tell you what you want to hear.” And so in a way they don’t tell you the truth. When you go to the doctor, sometimes you really have to dig in, because you know your body.
Rail: Can you talk about the figure covered in band-aids?
Osorio: The story is about the band aids I used when I was a little kid, that stood out more on me than they would on a light-skinned person. Stories like that become signals about how the medical field considers people of color.
Rail: I suspect you must have provoked some interesting internal discussions on the part of hospital staff.
Osorio: It’s too early to tell. I haven’t had an opportunity yet to sit there and watch and have conversations. It goes from weird at one end, to all the people who look at it and immediately connect and understand what I’m talking about, because they’ve also gone through that experience.
The figure that represents me is pierced with many needles. That’s because I decided to do acupuncture, and still go to the acupuncturist weekly, as a way of balancing the Western medical treatments. I combined the medical intervention that I was getting at the hospital with something that I felt was important and that I trusted. I’m fortunate to have medical coverage, but the people that don’t have medical coverage self-prescribe, and it turns into a completely different situation. That’s why pills are all over the place—
Rail: Pepón, I’m really moved by how you articulate your politics, and I know those politics come out of your being an empath, in the sense that you embody others’ feelings and what comes out has so many different levels of meaning. There’s the esthetics, the personal, and the emotional, and somehow your underlying desire to articulate a need for justice always comes through. I know it’s about your worldview, and the holistic way that you approach your work, but it’s still amazing to me how there’s no preaching going on in your work, no finger pointing. There is no political discourse, and yet, the political reality is ever present. Your ability to balance that amazes me.
Osorio: Thank you, Dan. I don’t shy away from taking a stand. I think that the more that I don’t wish to take a stand, the bigger the stand I will end up taking in the work. So it just allows the work to be what it is. I don’t like to tell people what they need to see. I believe in metaphor. I believe in the possibility of giving you the freedom to see as much as you want to see or as much as you’re willing to take.
Rail: I would also maintain that that degree of empathy is, by itself, a political statement. Many people share others' pain in deep and meaningful ways. But that’s your springboard.
Osorio: I also think of the installation as the debris of the process. When people stand in front of it, they’re looking at the installation in the present. But the process that allowed me to get to that place came from asking questions. I ask: Where are these people coming from? Who are they? What are their circumstances?
Unfortunately, we live in a time where production and process are not as important as the final product, and we rely on the final product—the artwork—as evidence. But I think that for me, it’s the other way around. I involve so many people in the process. I would say about one-hundred people were engaged in Convalescence. And then when the work comes up, and everyone sees it and they understand the process, which speaks to what I think is the most important thing to see: the after-effect, after the work is done and the complications that come along with it have been settled. That’s why I call it a debris. It’s the end of a process. So you’re standing in front of something that is very complicated, but that’s what politics for me are all about. It’s really, really complicated. It’s not as easy as taking a stand. It is listening. I demand a lot of compassion and empathy from myself as I demand of the viewer. There is this space that opens a conversation that feels circular to me, as opposed to unilateral.