Pepon osorio artworks barber shop
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Initially, I was not expecting much from my visit to the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico. As someone who was born and raised on the island yet hadn’t visited the museum in years, I expected the museum’s collection to be mostly composed of the kind of art that one would see at artisanal fairs and regional festivals. These artworks usually include depictions of traditional jíbaros, piragüeros, the Three Wise Men, and sugar cane factories. However, I was greeted by an impressive and diverse collection of artworks that put my initial biases to shame.
My first reaction was an audible gasp upon entering Pepón Osorio’s No Crying Allowed in the Barber Shop, one of the installation rooms located on the second floor of the institution. Peach-colored walls, black and vit checkered flooring, and an unbelievable amount of meticulously placed, decorative objects created an overwhelming sense of nostalgia for the aesthetic of the 1950’s in Puerto Rico.
The exhibition, which wa
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Pepón Osorio, Badge of Honor, 1995, mixed media. Installation view, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, 1996. Photo by Dennis Cowley. All Osorio photos courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.
Most urban dwellers live within their own limit politics—a linked network of socially and economically circumscribed spaces. The first time I met Pepón Osorio he took me on a walking tour through Manhattan’s Lower East Side, pointing out the quaint casitas nestled in the vacant lots between multi-story apartment buildings. Many who encounter these modest wooden structures are unaware of their connection to the 1960s social movements in Puerto Rico that gained land rights for the rural dispossessed. Los rescatadores de terrenos (rescuers of the land) built small dwellings on unoccupied land, eventually gaining ownership through squatter’s rights. As a parallel rescue and reclamation project, such impromptu, vernacular structures in the city reveal a community effort t
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Welcome to your watchlist
Pepón Osorio was born in 1955 in Santurce, Puerto Rico, and currently lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1975, Osorio left Puerto Rico and moved to the South Bronx in New York City, where he received a degree in sociology from Lehmann College and began working as a social worker in the Human Resources Administration. He later received an MA in sociology from Columbia University in 1985. Influenced by his experiences as a social worker in The Bronx, Osorio builds a participatory model of art that reflects the lives and stories of his communuities. Through his installations and sculptures, the artist calls attention to issues of race, violence, and gender prevalent in the Latinx community.
In his work, Osorio engages Latinx and Afro-Latinx communities in the conception of new projects and bases the success of his work on its impact on his communities. En la barbería no titta llora (No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop) (1994) is a mixed-