For and Against America

John Haber
in New York City

Juan Francisco Elso and An Emphasis on Resistance

Amalia Mesa-Bains: Domesticanx

When Juan Francisco Elso calls a work Por América, it may sound like a celebration or a warning. It unsettled many a viewer in 1986 expecting either one. Now it lends its name to a survey of his work, with contributions by more than thirty others as well. El Museo del Barrio sees it as a touchstone not just for him, but for art of the Americas.

Born in 1956, just three years before the Cuban revolution, Elso grew up with revolutionary fervor and high expectations. Yet that underestimates the pain he willingly accepted in his work. He must, he felt, to maintain what an earlier show at the museum called "An Emphasis on Resistance." Can a Chicana's thoughts on domesticity be just as revolutionary? Amalia Mesa-Bains and "Domesticanx" demand change only starting at home.

Blood and sand

Por América depicts José Martí, a nineteenth-century writer and revolutionary so revered that his bust all but litters Havana. Also at the museum, Reynier Leyva Novo mounts copies of his own, bleached and impassive in a covering of white gesso. He means to spread the word, and he also tracks a butterfly on its long migration north and south. For black artists, the Afro-Caribbean diaspora runs both ways as well, so that they can find their place in African and Western art. Yet Novo's virtual reality is going nowhere fast. The butterfly hovers awkwardly over a bust of Martí, as Methuselah, for as long as a 3D headset will permit.

Juan Francisco Elso takes more risks, including the risk of aiming too high and the risk of rejection. He turns Martí into a martyr, while making clear that martyrdom is none too pretty. His sculpture in wood is painfully smaller than life and ineffectual in its violence. Martí holds a machete that turns out to model Saint Sebastian, the first Christian martyr. What might be painted arrowheads or fleurs de lis pierce his flesh and spill out to new life on the gallery floor, like airplanes for Michael Richards. Elso's art is all about the body, as symbolically larger than life but close to the soil.

He builds with meaningful but fragile materials. Branches and sand go into sculpture of animals and trees, but also The Heart of America, The Hand of the Creator, and The Face of God. Who can see the face of God, and who is born in God's image? For Elso, the revolution itself, with uncertain outcomes. His claims are large but his sculptures few and his drawings negligible. He was only starting to live up to more when he died of cancer at age thirty-two.

Just weeks before, the museum looked at Raphael Montañez Ortiz and his impact on Latin American art, while MoMA continues the story of Latin American art with the gift of a collection. It sees Elso as important, too—to so many artists that his own work can be hard to pick out apart from its sheer size. The curators, Olga Viso and Susanna V. Temkin, take his career in no particular order, and they insist on his concern for everything from Afro-Cuban to Native American art. How much did he influence? Hard to say, but he tapped into widely shared concerns for today. A knife sticks up from a silvered box by Papo Colo, as threatening as Martí's blade. And then comes the immersion of artist after artist in branches, blood, and sand.

Much of it comes in performance. Ana Mendieta takes pride in her body in nature, set against the trunk of a tree. Senga Nengudi weighs down her stocking-like body bag, while Tania Bruguera covers herself in Cuban soil and human hair, as Burden of Guilt. Silvia Gruner alternates guilt and pride as she crawls and somersaults across the earth. Not in video, Scherezade García places the female body in a Garden of Dictators, while Gabriel Orozco has his patterns of decay. Belkis Ayón, who died the same age as Elso, victim of a crumbling revolution, gives bodies the support of angels.

African Americans turn up often, against all odds but fitting right in. Melvin Edwards has his welded shackles, Alison Saar her marks of violence, and Tiona Nekkia McClodden her plea for protection against it—in the figure of a girl or woman dressed in a golden coat of mail. A tree leans over in a photo by Lorraine O'Grady, as if offering itself for Elso's branches. In place of the hand of God, Glenn Ligon has the neon outlines of his own. Has inclusiveness become a fiction or a burden? Karlo Andrei Ibarra welcomes visitors into the act, with globes awaiting your chalk marks or erasures, but Martí, God, and Elso are watching.

Path of least resistance

A woman stands in a doorway to "An Emphasis on Resistance," in only the first of the exhibition's acts of resistance. She seems all the more confident and comforting thanks to the tropical sunlight behind her and the shadow to either side, barely deepening the entrance gallery's low, soft light. Could she be Susana Pilar Delahante, the artist, and could she be welcoming rather than barring the way? No doubt—except when she vanishes, leaving a view onto water. Delahante, a young black woman and a Cuban, thinks of her video projection as a metaphor for the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, but it could just as well stand for art as a doorway onto personhood, politics, the natural world, and the imagination. It introduces nine artists from throughout the Caribbean and South America, six of them women.

They have all won awards from CIFO, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami and have responded with commissioned work. Only one award, for Cecilia Vicuña, celebrates a lifetime of achievement, and their very prospect is off-putting. Sure, another group show—and another anointing of emerging and midcareer artists. The museum Web site has photos of them all but not a single work. Sure, too, to judge by the show's title, an obvious message. Yet the handful of works respond to one another, and the artists wear their resistance lightly.

They are not quite as apolitical as another Cuban artist, Zilia Sánchez with shaped canvas in the exhibition next door. Still, the glaring conflicts between refugees, regimes, Gulf artists, and the Trump administration remain implicit. Claudia Martínez Garay bases her graphic design on propaganda posters to attest (she swears) to oppression, insurrection, dictatorship, and rebellion, but she carries them in low relief into the third dimension. Yucef Merhi papers the walls with declassified documents, names from the official "no fly list" glaringly blacked out. Yet their tilted, overlapping display becomes something of a carnival, and the marks of censorship become a medium for individual protection. The no fly list takes flight.

Besides, that doorway opens onto a choice. One can pass through an actual door right next to it, for Merhi—or one can enter the nest of rooms through a wider opening to the right. There another tall, narrow projection picks up where Delahante left off, although Leyla Cárdenas makes hers freestanding. On one side, a classical column looks as spectral as lost memories. On the other, it seems composed of discrete threads, "unweaving the grid" (Cárdenas explains) of humanity, archaeology, and architecture. Further inside, Vicuña's cuts and knots in unspun wool stop just short of weaving it back together.

The connections and disconnections keep coming. That classical column shares a room with María José Machado, whose photographs continue its emphasis on public spaces. She pictures herself in performance, dressed in the reddish orange of an emergency or construction worker as their one spot of color. She also squeezes tightly into the space between rocks and other barriers, as a further warning. Vicuña anticipates the fashion for hangings and weavings, to honor the Andean concept of quipu—a merging of the body and the cosmos. Machado prefers the urgent or the comic to the spiritual.

Vicuña thinks of a loom as a recording device. Ana Linnemann delivers one, too, with makeshift machines on a shop table along with a pile of books. Nicolas Paris assembles his modular art from tubes like towel racks, only more colorful. How does it reflect his personal experience as a schoolteacher, and how does it serve as a classroom? I have no idea, but Oscar Abraham Pabón may supply the schoolhouse. His Resonance House, or closed shed of corrugated steel, opens at the back for piano keys, in a show open to unheard melodies and the path of least resistance.

Domesticity with an X

There is a word for what Joel Gaitan has made—from a time, place, and culture that he could never have known. They are "face jugs," like those of the Stone Bluff Manufactory in South Carolina, in and around the American Civil War. Set out on a crowded shelf, like the stoneware at the Met, they are every bit as comic, frightening, and schematic, and alive. For an oppressed people, like the black artists and laborers of Stone Bluff, they are also "us." Only Gaitan's honor his Nicaraguan heritage, his claims as a native-born American, and Mesoamerican art. They are also women, like Amalia Mesa-Bains and the rest of "Domesticanx"—or, not in the show, Natalie Ball.

Gaitan enhances his ceramics with gold highlights, as a woman's jewels or presence. You may not be sure how to take them, but then everything for Mesa-Bains is contested ground, much like Gaitan's immigrant community in Miami. She sees her own art as an expression of Latinx intersectionality, and she could hardly mind if the majority of Latin Americans do not care much for either term. She shares their concerns all the same, and her domesticity is only a step away from the traditionalism of others as well. It just happens to be a giant step, in the direction of Chicana and feminist theory, and she coined it in the 1990s in direct response to a male Chicano writer's notion of "rasquachismo"—a blend of machismo and rasquache, or ragtag. It appears in the show's title in full caps, as veritable shouting.

Like domesticity itself, it is a modest ideal all the same. Her photocollage pairs Eve, the requisite leaves covering her private parts, beside a sleeping nun. Yet neither will save herself or the other, and the grainy photos challenge their place in Western religion and religious art. It is not so far from a family photograph on a nightstand in someone's home. Sure enough, the rest of show boils down to domestic settings, with photos like that very much in evidence. Gaitan himself displays one, looking every bit out of the past, and so does a show of all but familiar household interiors, in paintings and assemblage.

The curator, Susanna V. Temkin, sticks to just six artists in addition to Mesa-Bains (who also appeared at MoMA PS1 in "NeoHooDoo"), half of them emerging. They seem more modest and intimate still in that all seven have much the same subject and motifs. One might never know which is from Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Queens. Misla, single named, sets the tone with the largest and least cluttered paintings. She might be poring through memories of childhood and home, down to the neatly made bed, the knickknacks on an ornate chest of drawers, and the photograph on a wall. Maybe you can bring memories of your own.

People themselves rarely appear, apart from the photos and Gaitan's face jugs. Maybe it takes a man, the sole male artist, to make a big thing out of women. Portraits by Cielo Félix-Hernández do depict women at more than half length, with colors out of Paul Gauguin. Still, they belong to their setting, in a house and garden. Satin fringes enhance the domesticity, as do paper fringes for Nitza Tufiño (who appeared before at El Museo del Barrio as part of Taller Boricua, the Puerto Rican workshop). She mounts her photos on paper hung like clothing, on hangers or out to dry.

Modest or not (all the more so compared to Elso's talk of God), they are also altars to the downtrodden and the everyday. Gaitan constructs an altar for his family photograph, while Amarise Carrerasaltar assembles others for her color photos, including blood red and everything under the sun. Maria Brito constructs an entire house, with an absurdly tall crib, lips in wood on a black cabinet, hands on the side, and white ladders ascending from one to another. It would have room for Tufiño's painted coffee cans. Mesa-Bains has her cabinet, too, alongside video mounted in the stomach of animals. Conflict may consume Latin American women and human lives, but they are not just shouting.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Juan Francisco Elso and Amalia Mesa-Bains ran at El Museo del Barrio through March 26, 2023, "An Emphasis on Resistance" through February 2, 2020.