The South Bronx is an important context for many artists where—within the sphere of the art world—they were able to overcome the impasse of the avant-garde, with their lofty images of utopian solutions, and art produced by so-called marginal artists. The common interventionist stance from Puerto Rican, African American, and white cultural workers, as well as the proximity and dramatic contrast to Manhattan as the economic and “high art” capital, was an important factor that shaped the art practices that took place in this borough.The exhibition and its catalogue, Urban Mythologies, examined the image of the Bronx—as represented in contemporary visual art, street culture, and the mass-media—in relation to significant urban issues and historical shifts from the 1960s until the present. The show featured works that either included representations of the Bronx, were situated in a Bronx context, or that otherwise contributed to the way in which the Bronx had been constructed and perceived in the public imagination, and on a worldwide scale. The diverse communities of the Bronx were notoriously sensitive to the need of finding new ways to connect with issues that embodied the local, without becoming provincial and myopic. Its mission was to evaluate how the Bronx fits into broader national and international contexts as well as a variety of local agendas. Based on these expectations, the project examined visual art and media representations of the social and geographic environment in which the museum is located, the local audience that it wanted to embrace, and the ways in which the Bronx is perceived from within and from the outside.Betti-Sue Hertz was a guest-curator at the Bronx Museum who had worked on both grassroots and professional visual arts projects—including folk art, public art, and conceptual projects—as well as collaborations with local agencies, and thus she brought a “community arts” background to the project. As far as she had worked in the Bronx since the early 1980s, Betti-Sue participated firs- hand in many of the events and exhibitions that were represented in the exhibition. She remembers the work when it was first presented, the circumstances around the creation of specific artworks, and the general sense of excitement that surrounded particular projects. As such, she felt that she was documenting (with some critical distance) a part of her own life.