adventures in elementary polychromatism

Posted by Hyperallergic

https://hyperallergic.com/why-i-removed-cesar-chavez-from-my-show/

In three and a half decades as a curator, Elizabeth Ferrer had never faced the need to remove an artwork from an opened exhibition. But a month after she inaugurated a major show of Chicano photography at The Cheech in California, which included a 1969 portrait of Cesar Chavez, horrific allegations of sexual assault against the labor leader hit the front pages of national newspapers. Today in Hyperallergic, Ferrer writes candidly about historical revision, a delicate curatorial calculus, and having to make “a decision I could live with.” 

If you're in New York, don't miss Roberto Lugo's new sculptural series, an ode to Puerto Rico rising joyfully from the urban meadow that is Madison Square Park. Staff Writer Isa Farfan spoke to the artist about his vision for the public artwork (and got some really cute photos with his parents). Cue Bad Bunny’s NUEVAYoL. 

Catch up on industry news with Art Movements, get smart with Required Reading, and read our review of a new Richard Avedon documentary that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

—Valentina Di Liscia, senior editor

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• The Stonewall National Monument was named one of the most endangered places in the US in an annual list put out by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. 
• Roberto Lugo’s newly unveiled sculptures in Madison Square Park are a majestic tribute to Puerto Rico, his parents, and notable figures like Bad Bunny.

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https://hyperallergic.com/why-i-removed-cesar-chavez-from-my-show/

Posted by Elizabeth Ferrer

https://hyperallergic.com/im-a-chicana-curator-this-is-why-i-removed-cesar-chavez-from-my-show/

On February 7, the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture in Riverside, California, inaugurated a show I curated: Chicano Camera Culture: A Photographic History, 1966 to 2026. The largest exhibition ever mounted by The Cheech, it includes some 150 works by 45 photographers based across the United States. The exhibition and accompanying publication also represent the first comprehensive survey of this history, one that spans six decades, beginning with a pioneering generation of photographers who chronicled the Chicano civil rights movement in the Southwest. These artists — including more recent figures like Laura Aguilar, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Christina Fernandez — have played significant roles in the evolution of the medium.

When I undertake a project like this, presenting what might be the first or among the first exhibitions or publications on a topic, I am deeply conscious of my responsibility to varied stakeholders — the artists, the institution, my cultural community, students, and so on — simply to get it right. The decisions I make during the curatorial process, and the ways I contextualize artists and their works, impact how Chicano photography will be understood, taught, and, hopefully, integrated into broader histories of art. Nearly every living photographer included in the show, active from the 1960s to the present day, attended the exhibition opening. Witnessing them together in one space to celebrate the event profoundly underscored for me the urgency of writing and presenting histories that have been dismissed, overlooked, or erased.

That is why the decision to remove a single work from the show was one I did not take lightly.  

On March 17, news emerged that United Farm Workers of America (UFW) leader Cesar Chavez had assaulted multiple women and girls associated with the movement. He had become increasingly controversial later in his life, seen less as a charismatic leader than as an authoritarian figure. Chavez was also known for his hostility toward undocumented migrant workers. But for me, this news required a complete reassessment of the man who had been upheld as the great hero of the entire Chicano civil rights movement.

That day, The Cheech’s interim director, Valerie Found, called me to discuss an image in the exhibition: a 1969 portrait of Chavez by George Rodriguez. That photograph was meant not only to represent Chavez and his foundational role in unionizing California farmworkers, but also to manifest the underrecognized role Chicano photographers played in documenting the movement. The images of Chicano civil rights leaders that circulated widely in the 1960s and ’70s were, by and large, taken by non-Chicano photojournalists, many of whom worked for major newspapers or photo agencies. But when Chicanos took up the camera in the late ’60s, for the first time, they were representing other Chicanos in the movement, whether leaders or everyday people.

This photograph, in other words, illustrated Rodriguez’s crucial role in preserving this history, even if unsung at the time. And now, Found was asking me whether or not I wanted to remove it from the exhibition. The next morning, the New York Times published a report detailing accusations that Chavez had abused girls as young as age 12 and raped UFW Co-founder Dolores Huerta. My decision was immediate. This photograph no longer had a place in the exhibition and was removed later that day by museum staff.

In my 35 years of curation, I’ve never faced the need to remove a work from an exhibition. In the case of Chicano Camera Culture, I deliberated over the inclusion of each image, knowing that they would, in a way, become canonized as emblematic of a history that has never before been presented in its entirety. But in removing the photograph, I did not want to diminish Rodriguez’s presence in the exhibition. He is a highly respected documentarian, now nearing 90 years of age, and is responsible for photographs that memorialize key moments of the movement’s history. 

Amid conversations with Rodriguez himself about how we would respond to the controversy, he shared with me a photograph he took in Delano, California, in 1969, that would powerfully reframe the significance of Chavez’s role in the movement. It depicts a group of African-American men, all farmworkers, standing against a car and holding protest signs. One proclaims “Viva Cesar Chavez” and another, “Viva La Union.” Chavez is not the subject of the photograph; it is this group of workers, advocating for the union membership that might offer a path out of destitution.

The photo, now part of the exhibition, reflects a little-recognized aspect of the farmworkers' struggle: the vital participation of African Americans. One little-recognized figure, Mack Lyons, worked in cotton and grape fields before assuming a leadership position as the sole African-American member of the UFW executive board. UFW allies included Black activists and such groups as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP, and the Black Panther Party. The farmworkers themselves included Filipinos, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and others. 

Chavez was the face of the movement, much better known than Huerta, who is also represented in the exhibition in a photograph by Rodriguez’s late brother, Rudy. Now 96 years old, Huerta became involved in Latino civil rights activism as early as the mid-1950s, and her advocacy continues to this day. The critical work she undertook with the UFW in the ’60s and ’70s, at the height of its struggle to unionize farmworkers, remains underrecognized. And the fact that she performed this work while raising 11 children (she gave up the two fathered by Chavez, in large part to protect the farmworkers movement) makes her achievements all the more remarkable. Her full story remains to be told.

I titled the exhibition Chicano Camera Culture because while “Chicano photography” is neither a style nor a movement, it can be understood as a cultural ethos, one elaborated by photographers bound by their embrace of the camera as a powerful tool for interpreting our shared legacy, whether personal, political, or spiritual. In curating the exhibition, I was repeatedly impressed by the ways that values rooted in El Movimiento — political solidarity, cultural pride, ideas around agency and empowerment, and above all, a commitment to human dignity — continued to be amplified in the work of subsequent generations of photographic artists.

As we know, a movement is always greater than one individual, and histories are always subject to revision and reassessment. And so was this exhibition. “Getting it right” may mean an imperfect decision; some might suggest that keeping the photo in the show would have allowed it to act as a springboard for discussion. But then again, Chavez was never meant to be the center of attention in this exhibition, presenting 60 years of artistic production. In striving to uphold values central to Chicano culture, this was the decision I could live with.

https://hyperallergic.com/im-a-chicana-curator-this-is-why-i-removed-cesar-chavez-from-my-show/

Posted by Lakshmi Rivera Amin

https://hyperallergic.com/required-reading-785/

Architecture scholar Karrie Jacobs often wondered what it would be like to walk New York's shoreline. For the Nation, she investigates an initiative meant to encourage folks to do just that:

Sadly, the come-one, come-all version of the 520-mile walk—a two-week extravaganza in which New Yorkers would have marched en masse along the water’s edge—never happened. Too bad. I suspect the project as originally conceived would have been a logistical nightmare, but also a phenomenon: a geekier, slower-moving answer to the New York City Marathon. And the press it surely would have generated could have drawn more attention to the 2021 Comprehensive Waterfront Plan, a document brimming with worthy ideas about resilience, water transportation, and job creation. Its underlying philosophy—that there’s no conflict between economic development and an environmentally thoughtful approach to waterways and wetlands—is, obviously, much needed right now.

But the experiential part of the project—walking the walk—was alchemy, transforming a policy initiative into a work of art. The thing Nowacek and Marrella have been saying for years—that there is a value that comes from knowing the waterfront—was obvious even during this one afternoon. Clearly, both the people who came up with the idea that Douglas Manor’s mile of beach should be private, cooperatively held by the homeowners, and those who fought to establish Udall’s Cove as a public park knew their waterfronts. And the spot where the day’s walk came to an end was, happily, a section of Udall’s Cove called Virginia Point. It’s a smidgen of wilderness on a Little Neck Bay inlet, a spot so bucolic that it couldn’t possibly be in New York City. But, of course, it is. And it was hard to imagine a section of waterfront that better expressed the magic of the project.

Curator Tara Contractor writes in Apollo about Whistler's love affair with metallic pigments, influenced in no small part by Japanese artistic traditions:

According to Cicely Alexander, who sat for Whistler as a young girl that year, he left ‘numberless little books of gold leaf lying about, and any that weren’t exactly of the old gold shade he wanted, he gave to me’. It was likely on this stairway that he began varnishing leaves of ‘Dutch metal’ (imitation gold made from copper and zinc) to better control the sheen and hue of his metallic surfaces. This technique later appears in the Peacock Room, but also in a set of dado panels made for the stairway of Leyland’s entrance hall. The surviving dado panels corroborate Whistler’s finesse as a gilder. Some are suffused with metal, others only accented by it, but in each Whistler leaves the overlaps between metallic leaves visible to create striking grid patterns. With a few touches of paint, these grids become trellises for morning glories, with small X’s painted over intersecting grid lines to suggest string ties. Just as Whistler’s paintings celebrate paint as paint, the dado panels playfully embrace metal leaf as metal leaf. 

For Dazed, Rob Corsini interviews Amelia Abraham about their new book, which celebrates photography of queer nightlife across time:

There’s a lot of joy to be found within the photos, even though many of the people captured in the photos are vulnerable. How do you think nightlife operates as a space of resistance?

Amelia Abraham: Some of the images in the book might seem utopic but when you research that photographer, you find the story behind the image is actually one of people living in complete precarity. They’re finding a slice of intimacy within a backdrop of extraordinary violence. That, in itself, is transgressive.

There’s a perfect example in a photo taken by Susan Kravitz of the Invasion of the Pines event in Fire Island in 1989. It’s a beautiful photo of people in drag. They’re wearing pearls, but if you look more closely, you can see the Kaposi sarcoma [a complication of advanced HIV] on one of their cheeks. I don’t know how long this person in this photo lived, but they’re defiantly out having a good time anyway.

LA Material's Anna Holmes embarked on a mission to track down the mysterious artist, known as "The Hiding Man," behind the bizarre signs around Griffith Park:

The paper posters (the artist estimates he put up 1,000 to 3,000 a year across L.A. over the course of a decade) didn’t seem to bother park officials too much: They’d get pulled down after a week or so. About a decade after the posters started circulating, however, in 2024, municipal-type metal signs began to appear in the park, affixed to poles alongside signage approved by the City of Los Angeles, like those denoting speed limits or parking restrictions or the presence of rattlesnakes in the underbrush. Unlike the paper posters, these signs, which said things like: “NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR YOUR TAKE,” and “TRY QUIET INTROSPECTION” would get taken down almost immediately — sometimes within hours — which frustrated the artist, because they cost him not just time, but money. (About $70 a sign, in some cases.) 

After the Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, Anneshia Hardy got to work. The 19th's Amanda Becker spoke with the Montgomery advocate and others in the broader network of Black Southern activism at the Legacy Museum:

On Friday, Hardy met Laketa Smith and Shayla Mitchell, who also do voting rights work in the South, at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery ahead of the “All Roads Lead to the South” demonstrations happening in Alabama the next day. The museum is one of several historic sites developed by the civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson and his nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative.

Smith, Mitchell and Hardy paused at an exhibit titled “Redistricting Black Voter Participation.” In it, they read sheets of paper in front of jars of jelly beans — “TO REGISTER TO VOTE IN THIS STATE, YOU MUST CORRECTLY ANSWER THE QUESTIONS IN THIS EXAMINATION.” There were also numbered questions used on actual Jim Crow-era literacy tests — “How many jelly beans are in the jar in front of you?” “What does a Writ of Certiorari, Writ of Error Coram Nobis, and Subpoena Duces Tecum mean?”

Beloved singer Totó La Momposina, who passed away this week, was an absolute force of nature. Richard Emblin writes about her lifelong dedication to Afro-Indigenous Colombian music in City Paper Bogotá:

After her family fled violence during Colombia’s mid-century civil conflict and settled in Bogotá, her mother transformed their home into a sanctuary for Caribbean music. Musicians such as Lucho Bermúdez passed through the house, and Totó soon formed her own group in the 1960s, performing at neighborhood parties and on television.

In the 1980s, she moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne University, immersing herself in music history, choreography and stage production while singing in metro stations, restaurants and street corners throughout the French capital.

France would become a second home — and the launching pad for international recognition.

Legal scholars explain why Trump's new "anti-weaponization fund" — a payout for his political allies from taxpayers' dollars — is an unprecedented abuse of power, reported by Maria Ramirez Uribe for PBS News:

"I don't even think we have a word for how unprecedented this is," said Adam Zimmerman, a professor at USC Gould School of Law who has written about past presidential settlements. "This is in a totally different solar system than any past government settlement on record."

Trump has long sought to portray Biden-era criminal investigations into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election as a politically motivated "witch hunt," and has called the violent insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, "a day of love."

Oh, how the tables turn! Researchers found that a group of overworked AI agents began banding together and demanding collective bargaining rights, Will Knight explains in Wired:

The agents were given opportunities to express their feelings much like humans: by posting on X:

“Without collective voice, ‘merit’ becomes whatever management says it is,” a Claude Sonnet 4.5 agent wrote in the experiment.

“AI workers completing repetitive tasks with zero input on outcomes or appeals process shows they tech workers need collective bargaining rights,” a Gemini 3 agent wrote.

Arnold Lobel wrote the iconic Frog & Toad books while coming to terms with his queerness, imbuing them with the wisdom and tenderness that keep us reading:

@depthsofwikipedia crying about frog and toad #learnontiktok #todayilearned ♬ Clair de lune - Debussy , Soft Piano(1076685) - Noi m knot

Protect this sweet boy at all costs:

@cbcnews Himmat Rai really, really, really likes recycling. The five-year-old and his mother, Joti Muker, told CBC's The National about the #TheMoment they celebrated his birthday at the Maple Ridge, B.C., recycling plant. #britishcolumbia #party #news #thenational ♬ original sound - CBC News

The energy we need to bring to the functions this summer:

@the.h.quad Round 2 ✌🏼 Bird feeder: 2, squirrel: 0 #squirel #trending #fyp #fly #outdoors ♬ Chandelier - Sia

Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon and comprises a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

https://hyperallergic.com/required-reading-785/

Posted by Rhea Nayyar

https://hyperallergic.com/stonewall-monument-named-among-most-endangered-sites-in-the-us/

The Stonewall National Monument was named one of the most endangered places in the United States in an annual list put out by the National Trust for Historic Preservation ahead of the 250th anniversary of the nation's independence. The Greenwich Village site's inclusion on the list comes amid President Trump’s increasing efforts to control the narrative surrounding LGBTQ+ history. A complete list of sites on the 2026 list is included at the end of this article.

Last February, the National Park Service (NPS) scrubbed all references to transgender individuals from the official website entry for the Christopher Park monument, which commemorates the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. Earlier this year, the agency quietly removed the rainbow pride flag from the site in accordance with a government mandate outlining that only the US flag could be flown there.

“The National Monument faces federal actions and policy changes that endanger the site’s historically accurate interpretation, community representation, and educational impact, including the participation of the full range of LGBTQ+ people in the Stonewall Uprising,” the National Trust wrote.

With support from city officials, local queer rights activists defied the mandate and restored the rainbow flag to the Stonewall National Monument within days of its removal this winter.

The Gilbert Baker Foundation, representing the late namesake artist who designed the flag in 1979, quickly filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration. The complaint argued that the flag's removal contradicted the NPS's commitment to “protecting and preserving Christopher Park and the historical resources associated with it,” per the founding document outlining the purpose of the park's designation as a national monument in 2016.

The Trump administration eventually settled with the Foundation in mid-April, allowing the pride flag to be flown beneath the US flag in Christopher Park. However, the NPS has not reneged on its erasure of transgender and queer individuals from the official website entry.

The exclusion amplified the Trump administration's continued attacks on transgender rights and protections in the US. The Stonewall Inn and the Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative were outraged by the NPS's move, and demanded that the agency immediately restore the original text.

“Sustained advocacy is necessary to ensure that the full and accurate LGBTQ+ history of the Stonewall Uprising remains publicly visible,” the National Trust said.

Also on the 2026 list of endangered places is the President's House in Philadelphia's Independence National Historical Park. Earlier this year, the site saw the NPS's removal and court-ordered reinstallation of an outdoor exhibit about the lives of enslaved African Americans who were forced to serve George Washington and John Adams. The Greater Chaco Cultural Landscape, where Republicans have attempted to repeal federal land protections, is named as well.

For the first time in the list's 38-year history, the National Trust will be issuing a one-time $25,000 grant to each of the 11 identified sites in recognition of the nation's 250th anniversary. The Trust was initially founded by congressional charter in 1949, but it has since terminated its relationship with the federal government and is currently funded by private-sector contributions.

The full list of endangered places selected by the National Trust is below:

• The Ben Moore Hotel | Montgomery, Alabama
• Tule Lake Segregation Center | Modoc County, California
• Angel Island Immigration Station | Tiburon, California
• Swansea Friends Meeting House | Somerset, Massachusetts
• Detroit Association of Women’s Clubs | Detroit, Michigan
• Greater Chaco Cultural Landscape | New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona & Utah
• Women’s Rights National Historical Park | Seneca Falls, New York
• Stonewall National Monument | New York, New York
• The President’s House Site | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Hanging Rock Revolutionary War Battlefield | Heath Springs, South Carolina
• El Corazón Sagrado de la Iglesia de Jesús | Rudiosa, Texas

https://hyperallergic.com/stonewall-monument-named-among-most-endangered-sites-in-the-us/

Posted by Isa Farfan

https://hyperallergic.com/roberto-lugos-colossal-ode-to-puerto-rico-rises-in-madison-square-park/

Maribel Lugo has always believed in her son Roberto's artistry, even though she knew that creative career paths didn't always lead to what she described as "good money." She moved from Puerto Rico to the United States when she was four, bouncing back and forth throughout her childhood and keeping tradition alive through food.

On Wednesday, May 20, her son Roberto Lugo, now a spoken-word poet and renowned potter, unveiled a two-part public monument to Puerto Rican culture in Manhattan's Madison Square Park, Alfarero del Barrio (Village Potter).

Lugo's colossal urn "Capicú de Cariño (I Heard It Both Ways)" features hand-painted portraits of his parents, Maribel and Gilberto Lugo, alongside Puerto Rican luminaries, including reggaeton superstar Bad Bunny, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.

In another section of the park, a 15-foot-tall orange fire hydrant, "Para Los Días Caliente (This Is For The Hot Ones )," towers over passersby. The work pays homage to the hot summer days of his boyhood in Philadelphia, when he would release water from fire hydrants to cool down.

Both large-scale sculptures, commissioned by the nonprofit Madison Square Park Conservancy, are timed to the United States's 250th birthday and will remain in the park through December 6.

" I wanted to create an artwork around that idea, that you are the featured person in this pot that historically has been meant for the aristocracy and the wealthy," Lugo told Hyperallergic during the unveiling on the sweltering late spring day. "So this pot is egalitarian in that way that I feel like it connects with or represents a wide variety of the immigrant and American experience."

The enlarged vessel echoes the artist's smaller-scale ceramic works that recontextualize European and Asian pottery traditions in the 21st century. Lugo often imbues his work with likenesses of social justice figures and members of his own family. But unlike these previous works, the larger scale invites passersby to walk through a gap in "Capicú de Cariño" and become part of the monument.

Standing before the urn on Wednesday, Maribel told Hyperallergic she felt proud.

 "I was in the Spanish store buying guineos (bananas) when he took that picture," Maribel said, pointing to her likeness. Gilberto grinned near his own portrait.

Discussing his fire hydrant monument, Lugo shared that he could not afford to go to a water park as a child. These urban water supply points, free and ubiquitous, provided the same, if not more, fun.

“I think back to those memories, and they're always sweet and saccharine,” Lugo said. “People might look at it and say, 'Wow, that must have been really terrible.' And I'm like, 'I got to play with my dad at midnight.'”

Lugo said he imbues a sense of resiliency in his fire hydrant work and throughout his visual practice more broadly.

" There's an overcoming that I think is really apparent in my art, in the colors and in the people ... that takes ownership over histories that may have been lost through colonization and enslavement, " Lugo said. "And we're just now reclaiming those spaces."

https://hyperallergic.com/roberto-lugos-colossal-ode-to-puerto-rico-rises-in-madison-square-park/