PRESENTATION: Pepón Osorio-My Beating Heart/Mi Corazón Latiente

Pepón Osorio is known for his provocative, large-scale, multimedia installations that merge conceptual art and community dynamics. His visual language, explosive and elegance challenges traditional art canons with richly textured monumental assemblages that travel far beyond accepted notions of beauty and aesthetics. He emphasizes the exhibition space as an intermediary between the social architecture of communities and the mainstream art world and incorporates a multiplicity of objects to recreate fantasy-like quotidian environments that advance critical discussions.

By Efi MIchalarou
Photo: New Myseum Archive

The exhibition “My Beating Heart/ Mi corazón latiente” spotlights Pepón Osorio’s large-scale, multimedia installations and sculptures created from the 1990s to today exploring issues of identity, race, gender, and social justice. Known for his provocative, sweeping, multimedia installations, Osorio creates fantastical scenes inspired by everyday environments—from home interiors to barbershops to classrooms—that advance critical discussions on topics such as identity, race, gender, and social justice. Informed by his background in theater and performance as well as his experiences as a child services case worker and professor, Osorio’s richly textured sculptures and installations are deeply invested in political, social, and cultural issues affecting Latinx and working class communities in the United States. The exhibition focuses on the elaborate environments that Osorio has been creating since the early 1990s, often developed through long-term collaborations with the individuals in the neighborhoods where they were first shown. The exhibition also premieres a new work, “Convalescence” (2023), which focuses on the difficulties of navigating the US healthcare system and the multiplicity of pathways toward healing. The exhibition features five of Osorio’s large-scale installations, the earliest of which, “Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?)” (1993), included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, reflects on the social impact of Hollywood’s violent representations of Latinx people, depicting what appears to be the aftermath of a murder in an apartment of a Puerto Rican family in New York City. Other large-scale multimedia installations from the 1990s include “En la Barbería No se Llora” (1994), originally installed in an abandoned barbershop in New Haven, CT, which tackles gender performativity and the perpetuation of machismo; and “Badge of Honor” (1995), first shown in a storefront in Newark, New Jersey, which investigates the effects of mass incarceration through an intimate conversation between a teenager and his imprisoned father. The exhibition also includes Osorio’s recent project “reform” (2014–17), created in collaboration with students and community members in response to a city-ordained shuttering of a Philadelphia school, and Osorio’s new work, Convalescence. Alongside these five installations, the exhibition will also include several sculptural works such as “My Beating Heart” (2000), a six-foot-tall anatomical heart adorned with a crepe paper technique traditionally used to make piñatas, outfitted with speakers resounding the artist’s own heartbeat. “My Beating Heart/ Mi corazón latiente” addresses themes that resonate throughout Osorio’s practice, including the simultaneous resilience and fragility of human life, the values and desires that propel humanity, and the fundamental urgency to better care for one another.

Photo: Pepón Osorio, Badge of Honor, 1995, Mixed media and video installation, Dimensions variable, © Pepón Osorio, Courtesy the artist, P.P.O.W. Gallery and New Museum

Info: Curators: Margot Norton and Bernardo Mosqueira, The New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 29/6-17/9/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.newmuseum.org/