Art Tuesday: Pepon Osorio
Welcome to another Art Tuesday! This week Artist is a fellow Puerto Rican, Pepon Osorio.
"My principal commitment as an artist is to return art to the community," - Pepon Osorio
Pepon Osorio is a Puerto Rican multimedia artist, better known for his large-scale installations that blend the conceptual art with the community dynamics. The visual language that Osorio uses, loud yet elegant challenge the traditional canons of the art world and makes his way into the polemical art world. With his large-scale, multimedia installations, he recreates common places like a bedroom, a house, or a simple community barbershop to provoke critical contemporary discussions about stereotypes, and cultural identity. By reclaiming symbols of an, often resilient, culture, he is empowering those symbols and stimulating the viewers to question and re-examine their own core values.
My favorite installation is En la Barberia No se Llora (No crying aloud at the Barber Shop) (Figure Above). It was the first piece I had the chance to see in person at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (MaPR). At first, the installation, as many of his, is overwhelming. There is a lot to see and to take at the same time. Pink walls filled with Latino Influential males personalities, barber chairs cover in plastic flowers, the flags, the salsa music all combined to tell a story, a story that started as his own but ended up being a representation of culture, social situations and stereotypes of a community.
Knowing his work has helped me find my own voice, learned how to deal with these issues and transformed them into pieces of art, in my case, photographs. He has opened a lot of opportunities, not only to Puerto Ricans but for all artists who have felt “othered” or who think that talking about their nationality or cultural identity is not a good theme in art. Pepon Osorio has become a great example of the issues and values he presents through his work. Helping his community along the way, returning art to the community.
The Installation was set up at an abandoned building in Manhattan Lower Bronx, where Osorioworked as a social worker.
If you haven't got the chance to see his work, I encourage you to watch Art 21: Pepon Osorio.Happy Tuesday!