Latest news with #HispanicSocietyMuseumandLibrary
NBC News
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- NBC News
These NYC Pride photos from the 1970s depict quintessential queer joy
NBC Out & Proud The Hispanic Society Museum and Library is featuring decades-old Kodachrome photographs of New York City Pride marches taken by artist Francisco Alvarado-Juárez. May 24, 2025, 7:15 AM EDT By Kaitlyn Schwanemann There are a few Pride march staples you're likely to find every June, dating to the first such events in 1970: massive handheld fans, ornate gowns, voluminous wigs and loving embraces. But at the ' Out of the Closets! Into the Streets! ' exhibition at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library in New York, there's one thing missing — rainbow flags. The photography collection, featuring 18 photographs taken by artist Francisco Alvarado-Juárez, depicts scenes from New York City Pride marches in 1975 and 1976 — just a few years before the LGBTQ flag was created in 1978. Alvarado-Juárez's collection is a time portal in more than one way, though: The photos were all captured on Kodachrome film, an early type of color film that is now discontinued. The exhibition is on display and will run until Aug. 31. It serves as the second installment of the museum's 'Arte en el Alto Manhattan' series, which highlights upper Manhattan artists. Born in Honduras and raised in New York City, Alvarado-Juárez said 'Out of the Closets! Into the Streets!' is not just the name of the collection but a call to action. 'Especially as we got to areas where there were residential buildings, the people in the march would chant, would call out the people in the buildings to come down, you know, out of the closets into the street, to come down and join us, which was a very effective way to communicate with different people who were not part of the parade,' Alvarado-Juárez said in an interview. Back then, in New York City, it wasn't called a Pride march; it was the Christopher Street Liberation Day March or the Gay Liberation Parade. It began on June 28, 1970 — exactly one year after the 1969 Stonewall Riots. Alvarado-Juárez, a painter, photographer and mixed media artist whose work has appeared in the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, hadn't anticipated the photos' being shown in a museum 50 years later. 'I was taking it for myself,' Alvarado-Juárez said. 'I was looking at the experience and taking photos as art for art, for the pleasure of doing art.' The photos depict march participants donned in feather boas, floral fascinators and fringe metallic vests, posing throughout lower Manhattan with red, white and blue party balloons and banners behind them. The exhibition is the Hispanic Society Museum and Library's first LGBTQ initiative, according to its website. While the full exhibit ends in August, selected works from Alvarado will be shown on the museum's outdoor terrace through next spring. Alvarado-Juárez said he lives just a few blocks from the museum, which is in Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood, and has been going there for nearly 30 years. 'It is quite, quite different to be able to see my work at the museum, as opposed to just visiting and looking at those masterpieces on the walls in the halls,' he said. Alvarado-Juárez said Pride Month, which is celebrated in June, has evolved over the years, with '70s marches functioning more like parades and parties and marches during the AIDS epidemic functioning more like protests against the government for failing to respond to the crisis. 'As we get into this very dark period of our history with this new administration,' Alvarado-Juárez said, referring to the Trump administration's policies targeting LGBTQ people, 'maybe people can draw some good energy from these images and enjoy them for what they were back then but also enjoy them for the energy they still communicate.' Kaitlyn Schwanemann Kaitlyn Schwanemann is an intern for NBC News.
New York Times
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Plates Full of Beauty and History in Upper Manhattan
It is not advisable to attempt to eat off any of Adriana Varejão's plates. Nor is it wise to ask the artist, one of Brazil's most prominent and audacious, to serve from them. (She once told an interviewer, with a hint of disdain in her normally gracious voice, 'I don't cook.') The curved fiberglass and resin plates she has on display at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library in Upper Manhattan — all but one nearly six feet in diameter —are encrusted with sculpted imagery and painted in surreally lifelike colors to convey flora and fauna, cosmologies and legends of the Amazon region. They reveal an artist whose work has assiduously engaged with many different chapters of Brazil's history. 'Each plate is like a universe,' Varejão said cupping her hands in a gesture of gentle explanation. 'I like how they relate to my passion for ceramics, for the decorative arts and their history, and how craft can disrupt artistic hierarchies.' Varejão was seated late last month on a bench facing into the museum's interior courtyard, where the five most recent additions to her acclaimed 'Plate' series are on view through June 22 in 'Adriana Varejão: Don't Forget, We Come From the Tropics.' Her first solo museum show in New York, it was conceived as a dialogue between her barrier-breaking work and the vast historical array of ceramics from Spain, Portugal and their far-flung areas of conquest first amassed by the wealthy American collector Archer M. Huntington. Ardent about the cultures of the Hispanic world, Huntington founded the society and made plans for the museum that would be a part of it in 1904. The neo-Renaissance building he erected to house his wide-ranging collections opened to the public in 1908, with thousands of works of art and artifacts ranging from paintings to ceramics, textiles, furniture, metal works, printed matter, and more. For the exhibition, Varejão's plates — raised on iron stands she devised to show the works from every side — have been placed in a semicircle around a mosaic crest that Huntington had inlaid in the courtyard floor. Emblazoned at its center is the Latin phrase 'Plus Ultra,' meaning 'Further Beyond,' the national motto of Spain since the 16th-century reign of King Charles I. 'It's a symbol of the Spanish empire,' said Guillaume Kientz, director and chief executive of the institution. But the sun has long set on that spin of the globe. Since arriving at the Society in 2021, Kientz has made it his mission to steer the institution into fresher waters, to shake off the rusty grip of colonialist notions, and update the past with infusions of the present, building a relationship between traditional curatorial pursuits and a contemporary art world mindful of the realities at play around it. He has made concerted efforts to connect with the surrounding neighborhood, which is largely Hispanic. Varejão's work is a resonant fit. Inspired early in her career by Brazil's homegrown Baroque architecture and its imaginative adaptation of azulejos — decorative Portuguese tiles — she has also repeatedly cracked open the ceramics' legacy to expose the violence of European conquest, the cruelty of slaveholding, and the persistence of inequality in the country of her birth. She has critiqued its share of military dictatorships, and its insidious colorism. She produced 'Mucara,' the earliest plate in this show, in 2023 for the politically charged inaugural Bienal das Amazônias mounted in Brazil's northern province of Belem. At Kientz's invitation she followed up with the other four. Andrew Heyward, a director at Gagosian, the gallery that represents Varejão in the United States, said, 'It's been wonderful to watch Guillaume revitalize the institution, and Adriana's immediate connection to it.' For Varejão, Kientz added, the plates are a balancing act 'between beauty and danger, history and modernity, nature and artifice.' 'They're both painting and sculpture,' said Varejão, 'and nothing is as it seems.' If the front of Varejão's plates teem with the natural and supernatural life of Amazon rainforests and waterways, their backs mimic designs she found on the ceramics in the Society's extensive collection. From 15th century Spanish lusterware she took a recurring grape-and-ivy-leaf motif; blue-and-white florals came from 18th-century Ming-style pieces made in Spain and Mexico; and stylized fruit had its roots in 16th-century Ottoman Iznik pottery. She has also curated a selection of such pieces as a complement to hers, set shelf upon shelf in imposing glass-and-metal display cases from the Huntington era that now run the full length of the courtyard's rear wall. On an even more dramatic scale is Varejão's interaction with the society's monumental outdoor sculpture 'El Cid.' Opposite the entrance, it was created in 1927 by Anna Hyatt Huntington, the well-known sculptor who in 1923 had become Archer Huntington's wife. By wrapping the equestrian statue of the notorious medieval Spanish knight in the coiled, brightly colored stranglehold of a giant Amazonian anaconda made of fiberglass, Varejão felt she had mounted a challenge, she said, to 'a symbol of masculine imperialism. The snake's open mouth looks like a woman's vulva, and it's about to attack.' An avowed feminist, Varejão likes to joke that she married her second husband, the film producer and gallerist Pedro Buarque de Hollanda, for his mother, the celebrated feminist writer and intellectual Helóisa Teixeira. (Varejão's first husband was the mining magnate Bernardo Paz, whose 5,000-acre art complex Inhotim to the north of Rio includes a pavilion dedicated to larger size Varejão works.) Not often mentioned is that Varejão, 60, spent her early childhood in Brasília, the planned city then under construction as a new federal capital in the still remote Central Highlands. Her father was a pilot in the Brazilian Air Force. Her mother, a nutritionist, frequently took her daughter along as she tended to the children of the city's poverty-stricken immigrant labor force. 'I think my mother connected me to a certain kind of tenderness,' Varejão said, 'and to the kind of openness that can absorb many things.' At university, she would abandon engineering to study art, graduating from Rio de Janeiro's Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage just as Brazil was emerging from two decades of military dictatorship, in 1985. Intrigued by the country's Indigenous cultures, she spent a period researching among the Yanomami, a tribe of the Amazon Basin in northern Brazil. Her work at the Hispanic Society returns her to those earlier explorations. 'Mucara (Opossum)' and its shamanistic depiction of an opossum head atop a woman's round-bellied pregnant body, like the imagery on the other four plates, draws on Indigenous conceptions of animals as receptacles for the spirits of humans. Such creatures also have the uncanny ability to blend in with their surroundings. The turtle of her plate 'Mata Mata,' Varejão pointed out, can be mistaken for a floating leaf by its fishy prey, and by traffickers illegally hunting them. The Ghost Bird or Mother of the Moon on the 'Urutau' plate, considered a symbol of female divinity, resembles a mere tree branch when its wings are folded. The pink dolphins of 'Boto e Aruã' can dart undetected among the colorful shell life of the silt-clouded waters of the Rio Negro. The eerily ocular-looking fruits sculpted onto 'Guaranã' come with tales of children's eyes planted in the forest floor. Varejão doesn't want it forgotten that the plates are messengers from a world at risk from deforestation, industrialization, and climate change. 'Its natural ecosystem is being destroyed, 'she said. 'The Amazon is burning. A way of life is disappearing.' 'There's a constant tension in Adriana's work,' said Kientz, 'between civilization or society, and nature or planet earth. But it gives hope that a balance can be found.'
