This art magazine article on Pepón Osorio overviews his career trajectory since the late 1980s, suggesting that he has pushed boundaries with his site-specific installations. His work addresses social issues by engaging in community outreach and involving local people as collaborators on his projects. In the early 1990s, he began creating installations that reflected Nuyorican culture and experiences, such as the AIDS crisis and media representations of Latinos as “criminals.” In such works, he addresses themes relevant to Latin(x) communities including ethnic identity, racism, masculinity, violence, imprisonment, disenfranchisement, displacement, as well as transculturation. These works combine sculpture, photography, video, and found and handmade materials. The article argues that his work offers the possibility of different levels of reception based its context: in nonart spaces, community members can have their identities “validated,” and in art spaces, diverse audiences can learn about themselves and others.
                                

Julia P. Herzberg is an art historian, independent curator, and Fulbright Senior Specialist living in New York. She completed her PhD in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 1998, with a dissertation on Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. She is a specialist of Latin American artists living in the United States, and has curated more than twenty-five exhibitions. Herzberg was a co-curator of The Decade Show (1990), held in New York at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, the New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and she was the curator of the official U.S. representation for the III Bienal Internacional de Pintura in Cuenca, Ecuador (1991). In addition to serving as a consulting curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York (1996–2001), she was a consulting curator for the 2003, 2006, and 2009 Bienales de La Habana, and she is a contributing and consulting editor for Arte al día Internacional. Herzberg has taught, lectured, and published extensively in the United States and abroad and received two J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board awards: one at the Pontificia Universidad Católica (2007) and another at the Universidad Diego Portales (2013), both in Santiago, Chile, and also served as a visiting professor at the Instituto de Arte, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile (2016).

Pepón Osorio (b. 1955, Santurce, Puerto Rico) is an installation artist who lives and works in Philadelphia, where he is professor of community art practices at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University. He is most well-known for his large-scale multimedia installations that evolved from his involvement with local Latino communities. In 1975, he moved from Puerto Rico to the South Bronx, New York, enrolling in Lehman College, where he majored in sociology. He went on to receive an MA in sociology from Columbia University in 1985, and worked as a social worker. Influenced by this experience, his visual arts projects have engaged with local communities since the mid-1980s. He has worked with over twenty-five communities around the globe, creating installations that reflect their lives and experiences. His major exhibitions include participation in the Whitney Biennial (1993), the Johannesburg Biennial (1997), the Bienal de La Habana (1997), and the Bienal de São Paulo (2006). He is also the recipient of many awards, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1999), the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage Fellowship (2006), the Legacy Award from the Smithsonian Institute Latino Initiative (2008), and the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association (2018).

This article appeared in ArtNexus, a periodical covering Latin American art, based in Bogotá, Colombia. Osorio’s artistic approach is associated with what today might be described as socially engaged art or delegated performance, making him an innovator of these genres. In addition to creating installations in art galleries and museums, he also began showing these works in quotidian spaces to challenge the role of “high art” institutions. [As a complementary reading, see Herzberg’s exhibition essay on Osorio in the ICAA Digital Archive, “Pepón Osorio: Transboricua,” (doc. no. 1344071)].