The New Yorker:

The unique history of El Museo has allowed it to be at the vanguard of what is now more widely accepted as the purpose of museums.

By Graciela Mochkofsky

The second triennial survey at El Museo del Barrio, “Flow States,” is loosely organized around the concept of diasporas and the movements of people across nations, geographies, and cultures. A major point the exhibit tries to make is that the current state of Latino art, which is the focus of these triennials, has been shaped by those movements, because Latino identities are inevitably the result of complex mixtures and interactions.

The show was assembled by a team of three: Rodrigo Moura, El Barrio’s chief curator; his colleague Susanna V. Temkin; and Maria Elena Ortíz, a guest curator from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. They selected works from thirty-three artists based in the U.S., Latin America, the Caribbean, and—expanding the geographical reach beyond the Americas for the first time in a triennial—Europe. They included two Filipino artists because, in Temkin’s words, they are part of “a shared imperial history that left a mark on their names.” The Philippines went through both Spanish colonization and U.S. occupation, and its people are often mistaken for Latinos in this country owing to their Spanish-sounding names. The curators themselves only learned that one of the artists, the late Lance de los Reyes, was Filipino when they contacted his estate. Norberto Roldan, the other Filipino artist selected, presents a series of altar-like assemblages of abandoned objects, materials, and debris from a gentrifying neighborhood in Quezon City—which, to the curators, recall the syncretic altars often found in Latino households.

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