Popular artists at El Museo del Barrio

Since its founding in 1969, New York City’s El Museo del Barrio has spotlighted the work of Caribbean and Latin American artists, with a special focus on Puerto Rico and its US diaspora. Its building on Fifth Avenue, facing Central Park, is a key location in the city’s art circuit — but El Museo’s latest exhibition is also its first to be unanchored in physical space, having been shifted online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Popular Artists and Other Visionaries, which opened on 3 August and runs until 8 November, 2020, “examines the contributions of thirty schooled and self-taught artists working between the 1930s and 1970s in different parts of the Americas and the Caribbean” — drawing on both the museum’s permanent collection and “virtual loans” from other institutions. Curated by Rodrigo Moura, El Museo’s chief curator, and co-organised by staff members Susanna Temkin, Noel Valentin, and Kristine Santos, Popular Artists brings together works by artists from Puerto Rico, Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, and various other countries across Central and South America. “The show departs from the term ‘popular painters,’” explain the curators, “to identify artists working on the margins of modernism and the mainstream artworld. Popular visual sources provide the narrative thread of the exhibition,” touching on themes such as “migration, exclusion, marginalisation, cultural resistance, indigeneity, selfdetermination, and autobiography.”

Sans titre (Le photographe) [Untitled (The Photographer)], by Micius Stéphane (c. 1945–1965, oil on masonite, 20 × 24 inches). Stephane’swork was informed by his previous occupation as a shoemaker. He paintshis characters just as they are: ordinary people with ordinaryexperiences like him

Sans titre (Portrait de femme avec les filles) [Untitled (Portrait of woman with two girls)], by Louisiane Saint Fleurant (not dated, oilon canvas, 30 × 40 inches). Saint Fleurant, a founding member of theSaint Soleil Group, is considered one of Haiti’s most renowned artists. Her tapestried Vodou-style portraits of mothers and their children takeus back to the importance of oral storytelling in West African traditionand the strong bonds of family