"Joy, Play and Resistance in the work of Miguel Luciano and Hiram Maristany"

Joy is transformative. It vibrates with generative possibility in an emergent and collective capacity to reimagine dominant structures and reclaim power. Play is nourishment. It is a vital and self-affirming expression of a community’s spirit. Together, joy and play are an antidote, a form of resistance, a refusal to break. They make space for one to revel in self-affirmation, kinship, and love.

This exhibition and full-color scholarly catalogue offer viewers access to an intergenerational visual conversation between the sculptures and installations of Miguel Luciano and the photographs of El Barrio in the 1960s-1970s by Hiram Maristany celebrating Puerto Rican culture while advocating self-determination, reclaiming joy and play as forms of power and resistance. 

Miguel Luciano is a multimedia visual artist whose work explores themes of history, popular culture, social justice and migration via sculpture, painting and socially engaged public art projects. His work has been exhibited widely and is featured in the permanent collections of The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, the Newark Museum, The National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. Luciano is a faculty member at Yale University School of Art and The School of Visual Arts in NY. 

Hiram Maristany was a photographer born and raised in El Barrio (East Harlem), New York. He came of age in the 1960s, when young New York–born Puerto Ricans were asserting a new cultural-political identity inspired by the Cuban Revolution, the Chicago Young Lords, and the civil rights and Black Power movements. Maristany was one of the founding members of the New York chapter of the Young Lords Party and became its official photographer, capturing some of its most iconic moments. His work is featured in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art and El Museo del Barrio.

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