Conversaciones con Manuel

PRESENTED BY CASA DE DUENDE

CURATED BY DAVID ACOSTA

FEATURING ARTISTS JOSE LUIS CORTÉS, GERMAN AYALA VAZQUEZ, GERARD SILVA AND DANIEL DE JESUS

Through an autobiographical lens of self-reflection, Conversaciones con Manuel (Conversations with Manuel) invites four, Puerto Rican male artists to establish a conversation with the life and work of the Puerto Rican writer and poet Manuel Ramos Otero (1948-1990). Otero emerged as one of the most important Puerto Rican writers and poets at the end of the twentieth century, and perhaps, its best-known queer writer and poet. The exhibition explores masculinities through the use of imagined cartographies; the mapping of the queer body; desire, the politics of the closet, AIDS, death, feminism, exile, and colonialism (all subjects of importance to Otero’s work).

Imagined cartographies are understood as “those methods of mapping literary space that generate both imaginative and culturally revealing understandings of recognizable and/or created worlds and their modes of habitation.” (Imaginary Cartographies, Karen Jacobs (Ed), 52.1, Spring/Summer 2014, University Press of Colorado.) The work generated by these 4 artists explores, establish, confront and gives voice to subjects and themes which preoccupied Otero throughout his life.; Such themes include the linking of the personal and the artistic self in relationship to the history of the Caribbean archipelago, specifically Puerto Rico, and its colonial status-the human body- -death and the construction of masculinity in Latinx culture - ( one that occupies complex, contested spaces where fact and myth merge in a series of historical, imagined, and imposed expectations that shape it.) A masculinity heavily influenced by religion, deeply rooted in heteronormative, and patriarchal structures with its attendant myths and dogmas.

The exhibition features painting, photography, video, sound, music, and poetry allowing the viewer to reflect on Otero's work and the responses to his work and legacy by the exhibition's invited artists.

Conversaciones con Manuel will be on view in Gallery 1 at Da Vinci Art Alliance starting May 30 until June 23. The opening reception will take place on Saturday, June 1, from 4-7 pm and there will be a live nude performance (Time TBD).