Punk, Monet and Puerto Rico: New Photography From Elle Pérez

New York Times

05-06-2025

Subtle resistance to representation is on display in a handful of new shows, where some artists are refusing the notion that figuration must be their primary subject, or what is required to be successful.
'Source Notes,' Lorna Simpson's riveting new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, highlights her shift toward painting while still emphasizing the artists' career-long interest in destabilizing expectations of Black life and the art that makes sense of it. The painter Jordan Casteel's newfound focus on florals is a dreamy drift away from her signature portraits.
And one of the most fascinating new artists I found to be coyly refusing to play the game of identity politics is the New York photographer Elle Pérez, whose exhibition at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Upper Manhattan centers the politics of personhood over the consumption of that same self. The lens lingers on physical terrain: yards, curving coastlines. The portraits included are mantle-size, which, in the cavernous space, dares you to come close and forge an intimate relationship with the work.
At first glance, one could erroneously wonder if the show, comprising nearly 30 images, a slide show, a short film and a collage, is a premature retrospective. The works on display span the artist's career from 2009 to 2025 and seem to be organized semi-chronologically. But it quickly becomes clear that 'The World Is Always Again Beginning, History With the Present,' organized by Jenny Jaskey, chief curator, in collaboration with Pérez, functions as a cut section invitation into the sacred practice of process.
This is a show that starts before you get to the show. The Academy is nestled in the vibrant and rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Washington Heights, near Boricua College. The elaborate iron gates of the 1923 building that welcome visitors invoke the Gilded Age and its arts patronage, a sorely needed reminder of possibility amid devastating arts defunding. As Pérez explains inside: 'This is the neighborhood that made me.' Pérez was born in 1989 in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents who were also born and raised there. (As Pérez said in a recent interview, 'My grandparents were the generation that made the jump.') Instead of traditional blocks of wall text, the artist chose to install fragments of their poetry, like those lines, which start the exhibition.
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