On a brisk winter’s day in 1970, six young Puerto Rican artists set to work building a geodesic dome underneath the Manhattan Bridge. Under the moniker CHARAS, which drew from one letter in each of their names, the artists culminated five years of organizing public housing initiatives for underserved populations of “Loisaida” (or, Lower East Side) with a futuristic structure that claimed a plot of American soil for their community.
In subsequent decades, CHARAS created more than 600 future-forward community programs for unhoused New Yorkers, public school students, and burgeoning artists. Their commitment to the working class spoke to the interrelation of art and labor for diaspora artists during the Civil Rights movement. While the 1965 Immigration Act opened the United States for expanded Latin American immigration, the decade that followed found migrant artists — many of whom fled US-backed dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Paraguay — actively involved in political struggles for representation. This history forms the basis of the Americas Society’s widely heralded two-part exhibition This Must Be the Place.
The show’s greatest strength is its insistence that the US did not passively allow representation; artists had to fight for it. Photographs of the Young Lords hearken back to the Puerto Rican activist group’s Garbage Offensive, in which entire neighborhoods created barricades of garbage along the busy streets of Spanish Harlem to protest the city’s long-term neglect. Posters from the New York Graphic Workshop — founded by Pratt students Liliana Porter, Luis Camnitzer, and José Guillermo Castillo, who were later involved with Contrabienial — address the war in Vietnam. Porter isolated a picture of a North Vietnamese woman with an M16 to her head from the September 13, 1970, issue of the New York Times, with typewritten text identifying her as South African, Colombian, “my mother, my sister, you, I.”
...
Read full article at hyperallergic.com
