‘Flow States: #LaTrienal’ opens at El Museo del Barrio
The new “Flow States” exhibition, El Museo del Barrio’s second iteration of its triennial survey of contemporary artists, opened on Oct. 9 at the famed East Harlem art institution.
The museum’s first effort to display the work of current-day Latinx artists was called “Estamos Bien” and took place from 2020 through 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. While that show looked at the work of U.S. and Puerto Rico-based artists, “Flow States” serves as a glance at the work of what its curators term the “diasporic flows” of artists in the U.S., Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Mexico, Asia, the Caribbean, and Europe.
The show’s curators — Museo del Barrio Curator Susanna Temkin and Chief Curator Rodrigo Moura, along with María Elena Ortiz, a guest curator from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth — selected works from 33 artists who span the extent of the Latinx diaspora. These are artists who convey wide-ranging artistic themes and focus on different ways of expressing who they are.
The cultural identities of the shows’ artists are also an effort to expand the idea of Latinx: the curators say they selected work from artists who go beyond the expected geographies of where you might find folks who identify as people of Latino descent. The show’s artists are not all from Spanish-speaking nations and don’t even all identify as Latinx — in the end, many may only come from a shared colonial history in the Americas or have experienced a similar kind of imperialism.
“We do think that there are a lot of conversations that are being had amongst artists who are working across different places, coming from different backgrounds, using different media,” Temkin told the Amsterdam News. “So, we came up with this idea: the title is ‘Flow States,’ and we wanted it to have this kind of double meaning.
“A ‘flow state’ is like when you’re in the zone, in that creative flow — when you’re really kind of, like, feeling the juices: It’s a psychological term. But because of our interest in kind of breaking with the geography we wanted to add the ‘s’ to pluralize states, to really make it more heterogeneous. So, it’s not that you’re going to come to El Museo’s La Trienal and see one kind of art; you’ll see a whole variety of works by an intergenerational grouping of artists.”
The survey of works includes “Persona Non Grata” by Jamaica-born artist, Cosmo Whyte. The piece features a documentary image from the 1968 student uprisings in Kingston, Jamaica, which has been placed behind a beaded curtain. Viewers must part the curtain and walk in on an eerie, distant scene of protest, which gives the sense of experiencing and being a part of that moment.
Bahamas-born Anina Major’s mixed media installation “In the Marketplace II” looks at the tradition of the straw market and basket weaving to reflect on how the tourist industry — where woven baskets are commonly sold — can be both exploitive and serve as a showcase for local culture.
Photographic pieces by Widline Cadet, who was born in Pétion-Ville, Ayiti, look at Black migrations and the ways Black people adapt and live in diasporic environments. The exhibition features her “Ant yè ak demen (Between Yesterday and Tomorrow), 2023,” “Pou kouri dèyè syèl la (To Chase the Sky), 2023,” “An Echo of Gratitude, 2023,” and “Santiman fantom (Ghost Feelings), 2023” on display.
In another piece, the Puerto Rican artist Tony Cruz Pabón drew with graphite on the museum’s wall and only recently finished “San Juan (Puerto Rico) / New York (de la serie “Dibujos de distancia”), 2024.” Pabón had been working on the piece at the museum for two weeks.
“He’s been transcribing or attempting to transcribe the distance between his home in San Juan and New York City,” Temkin explained. “He’s referred to that as a very kind of mythical journey that many people have taken. Every day he’s been drawing very repeated lines on the wall: he just concluded by drawing, I think, over 4,000 lines. And he’s created this mask that’s meant to evoke the physical and also the mental and the conceptual distance between these two places.”“Flow States” artists, who hail from the various locations where the culture of Latinidad has made an impact, will also take part in special events at El Museo del Barrio while the show remains up through March 9, 2025. This Friday and Saturday, Oct. 11 and 12, San Antonio-based artist Mark Menjívar will conduct a free artist-led bird walk in Central Park, in connection with his piece featured in the show, “La Misma Cancíon, 2024.
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