Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, in 1955, Pepón Osorio moved to New York City in 1975 and studied social work at Lehman College in the Bronx, eventually becoming a social worker for the Department of Human Services of the City of New York in 1980. These facts are crucial to understanding his work, as his art is a direct result of his deep empathy for and understanding of the experiences of disenfranchised families, and the Nuyorican community specifically. His work with local artists in the South Bronx throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, his creation of the (still-functioning) Longwood Art Gallery at Hostos Community College in the Bronx in 1985, and his time as an artist in residence at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 1986 and at El Museo del Barrio, New York, in 1989 also serve to underscore his genuine experience of this neighborhood and the Nuyorican community that has made its home there since the 1940s. Through three powerful and emblematic works of the 1990s, Osorio forged a path for a participatory creative practice that appeals to community activists and artists as well as to curators seeking a more inclusive way to approach cultural work.
“Every time I create a work of art, I’m trying to say something in order to release that core [narrative], in order to let that core move through our community and allow the people to talk and reflect back on what I have to say. It’s not that I’m telling a story; it’s that I’m allowing others to tell their own stories as I come in, showing the work.”—Pepón Osorio
Created over three years, Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?) (1993), No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop (En la barbería no se llora) (1994), and Badge of Honor (1995) are a crucial set of works in Osorio’s broad career. Across them, the artist traced a trajectory that helped him rethink the role of art in public spaces—the privileged space of the museum and the humble space of the street—and, eventually, in the privacy of the home. He sought and welcomed public engagement in these various forms through storytelling, beginning with his own stories. These three works highlight all that the artist had experienced as a member of the Puerto Rican/Nuyorican community in the South Bronx—experiences also understood by similar communities in Hartford, Connecticut, and Newark, New Jersey, underscoring the extension of the Puerto Rican diaspora into the US Northeast, and inserting these stories into the history of American art.
How does one represent, through a work of art, a life lived? Or a tragic event that was seen by multitudes—on television, perhaps—that then became emblematic, expected, and a conduit to prejudicial beliefs? How, further, is a work like this created not by one person but with the input of those most closely affected by the issues presented? Osorio gradually created a new way of working together, sharing opinions along the way about the parameters of representation and its varied purposes.
Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?) was created specifically for the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Osorio’s first opportunity to show an installation in a large mainstream museum. The first impression is that it re-creates the home of an elderly aunt or grandmother of a Latinx family. Closer inspection reveals a love for the Puerto Rican flag, which appears on chair cushions and other upholstery. We see a china cabinet filled with figurines; family photos; and religious statues and statuettes around the space, including two large ones of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception clothed in white and light-blue robes. There are references to Spanish culture as well as to orishas, or divine spirits of the Yoruba religion, here in the guise of Catholic saints. There is also a human-size figure covered in a bloody white sheet lying on the floor. Yellow police tape separates the installation from the viewer, considering the complicity of the spectator in this scene of violence.
All the religious figures act as witnesses not just to the most recent drama, but, indeed, to all the familial moments shared here. There is an ornate sofa covered in plastic, reminiscent of many immigrant homes in New York City and elsewhere, as newer arrivals preserve the most cherished parts of their home. This, we now gather, is the home of a Nuyorican family in the Bronx. Osorio himself described it as placing a part of the South Bronx inside the museum space—and an extremely powerful museum on Madison Avenue. He knew it would be the first time most of the Whitney Museum’s audience experienced the inside of a Puerto Rican/Nuyorican home. With the installation, he wanted specifically to make “a very calculated intervention . . . to provoke change, not only socially but also physically and spiritually.”
Marimar Benítez notes: “It is evident in his interventions . . . that these installations hit a nerve: they provoke identification, rejection, empathy. We Puerto Ricans and Latinos recognize ourselves in those pieces; they remind us of spaces where we have lived or where we have been; we have those same objects in our homes.” The Whitney Biennial in question became the most discussed Whitney Biennial ever, also known as the “multicultural” or “identity” edition. Curated by Thelma Golden (the first person of color to have this role), Lisa Phillips, John G. Hanhardt, and Elisabeth Sussman, it included works by eighty-two artists, many of them artists of color who had not received widespread national attention prior to the show, such as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Daniel Joseph Martinez (who made the critical I Can’t Ever Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White for the museum’s admission buttons), Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, and Fred Wilson. The works addressed identity politics, racism, poverty, and the AIDS crisis, among other topics. The exhibition marked an important shift in how US institutions engaged with gender, race, and representation in their exclusive spaces and was overtly criticized for its attention to these topics rather than to “excellence” or “artistic rigor.” The parallels to the current cultural atmosphere are powerful.
Early on, Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?) was understood by art historians and cultural critics as an indictment of the US media. The artist himself has underscored that the work was, in part, a response to the US media’s dissemination of almost exclusively negative stories about Latinx communities, as though crimes and violence are endemic to our neighborhoods and don’t exist outside of this entrenched stereotype. The artist’s approach was directly connected to the politics of museum displays, as he rightly understands them. Creating the work for an audience unfamiliar with the inside of a Nuyorican home, he challenged viewers beginning with the work’s title, presenting a scene that is simultaneously tender and violent. The family’s home, filled with objects of domestic life, is enriched with the artist’s proclaimed aesthetic of “more is more.” At the same time, the covered body, the crime scene tape, and the abundance of newspaper articles focusing on violence and death across Latinx communities attest to the limited view of Puerto Rican life visible in local and national TV news media but also in books, films, magazines, and other sources. The home acts as a contrast to this, a vessel for the fuller lives once lived there, as seen in photographs throughout the two rooms. These tell multigenerational stories that we, as viewers, are given the opportunity to witness firsthand.
After mentioning to his neighbor that this work was featured in the New York Times and realizing she was unfamiliar with the newspaper, Osorio determined to create an installation literally in and with his community. The opportunity came in 1994 with No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop (En la barbería no se llora), which was installed in a storefront in the largely Puerto Rican community of Park Street in Hartford, Connecticut. The entire installation was created in collaboration with local residents. The artist engaged the public through conversation, workshops, and artistic collaborations. His belief in contradictions and their ability to coexist is at its heart. The barbershop scene is replete with symbols of masculinity—car seats, sports paraphernalia, trophies, action figures, and multiple photos and videos of men in conventionally masculine poses, so as to comment on machismo in Latinx communities and its heightened role in male-dominated spaces. The narrative is drawn from Osorio’s own experience as a five-year-old getting his first haircut from a barber unused to kinky hair. This rite of passage turned into a disaster, as he cried throughout. He acknowledges the coming together of this important life moment with an acute awareness of racial difference. He sees the work as an homage to his Afro-Puerto Rican father, and as a rumination on the fact that people of African descent have been displaced from their original communities and how this continues to intervene in their existence.
The work also deals with Latin American/Latinx machismo across the Americas. Videos in the work feature men doing “masculine” things like putting on a tie, but also forbidden or “feminine” things, such as crying. Some of the men in the videos were residents of the Casa del Elderly, a retirement home for Spanish-speaking elders directly across the street from the installation. Their presence in the space underscores the multigenerational nature of machismo and its role in Nuyorican culture. As with Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?), the installation was covered in plastic toys and plants, hubcaps, and photos of well-known men from Latin America and the United States, including political and academic figures like Pedro Albizu Campos and Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, and sports figures like the Puerto Rican boxer Félix “Tito” Trinidad. Creating a space that, in the artist’s words, “provides, aesthetically, an uncomfortable reaction in many people” was key.
Some scholars have suggested that Osorio’s aesthetic of excess is a kind of “reappropriation of the stereotype of the Latino in order to underscore the racism implicit in the politics of display of the museum.” This aesthetic, however, is a tactic the artist has used to create his earliest sculptures and installations. Among these works, La Cama (The Bed, 1987) is a four-poster bed with a lacy bedspread covered in plastic toys, dolls, pennies, and capias, the frilly, beribboned, pastel-colored party favors that are pinned to guests at christenings, showers, birthdays, and weddings. Through these objects and photographs, the artist tells the story of his own life. The accumulation of objects, in the artist’s vision, relates to accumulating emotions in the planning of his creative efforts. He notes: “Overloading is an important facet in my work. I play a lot with abundance, with the philosophy [that] more is better. . . . It is very important because it speaks about abundance. It deals with Puerto Rico today; with the worries about shortages, witnessed by our parents during WWII; it concerns the fear of recession, of depression—be it emotional, individual or economic. It affects the way Puerto Ricans live for appearance’s sake.” The will to fill spaces, to accumulate objects plentifully, then, is a reflection of Osorio’s own methodology, what he calls the “retrieval of experiences that had always been there, that had to do with self-recognition at home.”
“We were making work that reflected our lived experience. My experience as a caseworker became my artistic practice. All that I learned [as a social worker in NYC Human Resources Administration] became my methodology—making real artwork with real experiences and people.”—Pepón Osorio
The artist’s interest in lived experience and the concept of home was highlighted in Badge of Honor, installed in a storefront in Newark, New Jersey, in 1995. In this case, the artist interviewed a father and son who were separated by incarceration. Their presence/absence in each other’s lives was echoed in the spaces in the installation: a jail cell, representing the father’s space, and the bedroom of his son, a teenage boy, both devoid of human presence other than the videos through which they speak to each other and the material evidence of their existence within these spaces.
The artist notes that the 1995 Million Man March and the birth of his second son prompted the creation of this work, which delves deeply into familial care and love. In preparation, the artist visited many young people in Newark. In some Newark communities in the 1990s, a father’s incarceration was considered a “badge of honor,” an unspoken protective shield for the child. At the same time, the artist was working with men in the prison system, and one of them approached him asking to be a part of his work. After three weeks of interviews with this man and his son, the artist felt compelled to re-create each of their “rooms.” The son’s room is about illumination and light and is created with Osorio’s typical maximalist aesthetic, focused on the tastes of a teenage boy: trophies, baseball cards, images of prominent sports figures, team jerseys, basketballs and baseballs. By contrast, the father’s cell is minimally furnished with authentic jail cell elements—toilet, cot—sourced from actual corrections entities. With Badge of Honor, the artist sought to “acknowledge the trauma of incarceration; to build compassion, empathy, deep listening, deep care and [demonstrate the] love that families have for one another.” When this work was acquired by New York’s MoMA in 2020, it was the largest and most prominent object by a Puerto Rican/Nuyorican/Latinx artist to enter that collection, thus acknowledging Osorio as an important artist in the history of art in the United States. Its placement has implications for the future of US Latinx artists in national collections and exhibitions.
Reflecting on the connections between the social and political contexts in which Osorio’s work was displayed in the mid-1990s versus our current moment, it is important to acknowledge what could be considered the sunsetting of the “age of multiculturalism” and the rise of the 1990s culture wars in light of the current wave of anti-DEI sentiments, anti-immigrant backlash, anti-queer and -trans legislation, the criminalization of migrants, and the exponential growth of mass incarceration. Osorio’s works from more than thirty years ago point to issues that continue to make headlines today, as racism, criminalization, and poverty persist in affecting communities that are already most plagued by inequality. One response to the successes of social justice organizations in reducing mass incarceration has been to build detention centers in which to incarcerate border-crossing migrants and others entering the United States seeking safety. Osorio’s history with vulnerable families and children in New York City’s social services system inspired his deeply empathetic works, which are visual love poems to the Nuyorican communities of the South Bronx, East Harlem, Hartford, Newark, and Philadelphia, with relevance across many borders.
“There are a lot of details, personal details that are related to [the narrative in a work]. I think the very personal becomes universal in that sense, because I think the concept, the ideas, the intentions that I have are a universal language and connect to many different people at many levels. And that’s how I come to create work from the very specific. What in a general public will be the least important event in their life becomes a significant work of art that has tremendous resonance in a larger public.”—Pepón Osorio