Making Room for Self-Expression at the Bronx Museum of the Arts – Bronx Times

Museums are like special homes, costing millions of dollars, designed to house art as old as ancient Egypt and as recent as yesterday. Visitors simply walk by and ogle before retreating to their respective homes while the paintings lie dormant in their austere spaces. But the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ latest exhibition reminds visitors that the people behind the artworks are just as important, and that they, too, have their place.

“Making Room: Museum As Space for Self-Expression” focuses on the individual and their coexistence with others and the world at large. From Shellyne Rodriguez’s “Ex-Voto: The First Cosmos” (2019) depicting an image of her aunt’s deceased lover taking up space in the lobby of a building, to LaToya Ruby Frazier’s “Grandma Ruby’s Porcelain Dolls” (2004) depicting an adorable young child mimicking the faces of the dolls in the photo, humanity is the subject of the exhibition with several Trinitarian themes proliferating throughout the exhibition.

The first is that of the artists themselves, with an exhibition composed of professional artists from the permanent collection, the Teen Council and the Lifelong Studio.

Established in 2005, the Teen Council is a paid internship for high school students ages 14 to 19. In addition to having the opportunity to work alongside professional artists, they are also responsible for the museum’s ‘zines, which feature drawings, poems, and short essays written by the teens themselves.

In “Making Room,” the Teen Council worked to produce the wall stickers and busts of themselves with the help of Rigoberto Torres, who, throughout the 1980s, along with his contemporary John Ahearn, began immortalizing Bronx residents in plaster. The two had their first major retrospective at the Bronx Museum in 2022.

To create the busts, the model lies on a table and straws are placed in his nostrils while alginate is poured over his face and shoulders and allowed to harden while pieces of gauze soaked in plaster are superimposed.

“I tried my best not to panic because I couldn’t breathe. If you think about it, my life was in their hands,” Success Taylor told the Bronx Times.

The 17-year-old Teen Council member is currently in his third session with the museum and first joined when his mother brought home literature about the program.

“Not only did we learn by making our own art, but we also learned other people’s stories through their art and how they expressed it, which really inspired me,” Taylor added.

At the other end of the spectrum is Lifelong Studio, founded last year, which offers free art-making classes to creatives aged 55 and over, like Miriam Dawn Tabb, who was taught to photograph everyday things, like a hot food buffet or people posing for the camera after a fashion show.

In Tabb’s “What’s For Dinner?” there are no people, but that indicates a mouth to feed, and with a plethora of soul food including cornbread, macaroni and cheese, and collard greens, there’s also the question: Who are we feeding?

“I’m interested in something as simple as doors because they’re something through which we welcome and say goodbye,” said Tabb, who also likes doorknobs and thresholds that can speak to another era when a certain architecture was the style of the moment.

The Lifelong Studio, like the Teen Council, offers individuals the opportunity to see the world through a different perspective and then the opportunity to externalize that understanding through art.

Three themes divide the space in “Making Room”: “Me,” “We,” and “Here.”

“‘Me’ is more about the individual’s search for their identity as an artist or just a personal identity expressed through art,” said Patrick Rowe, director of education and public engagement, who co-curated the exhibition with Nell Klugman, associate director of the same department. “‘We’ is about the formation of an artistic community and the ways that can be expressed in artwork, while ‘Here’ literally refers to the resources, spaces and programs that we have here.”

“We” is perhaps the most powerful theme, forcing one to understand that nothing is created in a vacuum and that everything depends on something or someone.

Influenced by the works of Claes Oldenburg, Lucia Hierro’s “Circulares” (Circulars) (2017) is one such example. What at first appears to be a whimsical exaggeration of a mundane object reveals a deeper context of who we are socially and economically and how we present ourselves.

“The bag itself is kind of a product of these people being very savvy and surviving despite the rising prices,” Hierro said of his work.

A huge store is filled with supermarket flyers advertising the sale prices of groceries. These flyers are actually digitally printed on foam-filled fabric and sewn together. When you think about where these cheap flyers are distributed, who uses them, and who distributes them, the realities of economic disparities become clear.

“Circulares” (Circulars) is the last project Hierro worked on with his mother, Lucia Guzman-Garcia, who shared the same first name. Hailing from the Dominican Republic and working in a sewing factory when she arrived in New York, Hierro’s mother taught him how to sew and collaborated with the Yale alumna throughout her life until her death last November.

As a young artist, Hierro initially rejected her mother’s teachings, viewing sewing as a low-level activity. But over the years, she began to learn the importance of not only the art of sewing, but also the time spent with her mother and the importance of appreciating all levels of the art.

The title of Hierro’s work reflects its setting and the ethos of the Bronx Museum – a bilingual museum located in the middle of a Spanish-speaking neighborhood with a large Latino diaspora.

Finally, a more abstract trio is that of the artist, the spectator and the space, where the existence of each depends on that of the other. Together we create art. Together we build community. Together we make space.

“Making Room: Museum As Space for Self-expression” will be on display at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through August 18.

For more information, visit bronxmuseum.org/exhibition/making-room.

Contact ET Rodriguez at [email protected]For more information, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @bronxtimes