Spring 2022 BCC Puerto Rico Research Tour

In Imaging The Great Puerto Rican Family: Framing Nation, Race and Gender during the American Century, Hilda Llor ns offers a ground-breaking study of images--photographs, postcards, paintings, posters, and films--about Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans made by American and Puerto Rican image-makers between 1890 and 1990.

Staging an important new conversation between performers and critics, Blacktino Queer Performance approaches the interrelations of blackness and Latinidad through a stimulating mix of theory and art. The collection contains nine performance scripts by established and emerging black and Latina/o queer playwrights and performance artists, each accompanied by an interview and critical essay conducted or written by leading scholars of black, Latina/o, and queer expressive practices.

Acclaimed art historian Shifra Goldman here provides the first overview of the social history of modern and contemporary Latin American and Latino art.

This groundbreaking volume is the first to examine the range of Latino media arts, from independent feature production to documentary to experimental video. The essays explore the work of Chicano, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, and Latino film and video artists and address avant-garde practices, queer media, and performance art as well as more conventional film and video representations.

Ricanstruction: Reminiscing & Rebuiliding Puerto Rico is an anthology featuring contributions from writers and artists from the comic book industry like Gail Simone, Greg Pak, Reginald Hudlin, Denys Cowan, Tony Daniel, Ken Lashley, Bill Sienkiewicz, Yanick Paquette, Gabby Rivera, Will Rosado, Jorge Jimenez, Mike Allred, Chris Sotomayor, to Puerto Rican and Latinx celebrities like Rosario Dawson, Rubén Blades, Javier Muñoz, Sonia Manzano and over 100 more.

The tradition of portraiture in Latin America is astonishingly long and rich. For over 2,000 years, portraits have been used to preserve the memory of the deceased, bolster the social standing of the aristocracy, mark the deeds of the mighty, advance the careers of politicians, record rites of passage, and mock symbols of the status quo.

The essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans and the analytic philosopher Jorge J. E. Gracia share long-standing interests in the intersection of art and ideas. Here they take thirteen pieces of Latino art, each reproduced in color, as occasions for thematic discussions. Whether the work at the center of a particular conversation is a triptych created by the brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre, Andres Serrano's controversial Piss Christ, a mural by the graffiti artist BEAR_TCK, or Above All Things, a photograph by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Stavans and Gracia's exchanges inevitably open out to literature, history, ethics, politics, religion, and visual culture more broadly. Autobiographical details pepper Stavans and Gracia's conversations, as one or the other tells what he finds meaningful in a given work. Sparkling with insight, their exchanges allow the reader to eavesdrop on two celebrated intellectuals--worldly, erudite, and unafraid to disagree--as they reflect on the pleasures of seeing.  

An examination of Puerto Rican fine arts in search of the features that affirm their distinct identity. Bilingual text, Spanish-English. Contains over 100 color photographs and as many in black and white.

Traces the themes and characteristics present in the plastic arts of Puerto Rico which represent a search for the Puerto Rican identity.

Boricua Pop is the first book solely devoted to Puerto Rican visibility, cultural impact, and identity formation in the U.S. and at home. Frances Negrón-Muntaner explores everything from the beloved American musical West Side Story to the phenomenon of singer/actress/ fashion designer Jennifer Lopez, from the faux historical chronicle Seva to the creation of Puerto Rican Barbie, from novelist Rosario Ferré to performer Holly Woodlawn, and from painter provocateur Andy Warhol to the seemingly overnight success story of Ricky Martin. Negrón-Muntaner traces some of the many possible itineraries of exchange between American and Puerto Rican cultures, including the commodification of Puerto Rican cultural practices such as voguing, graffiti, and the Latinization of pop music. Drawing from literature, film, painting, and popular culture, and including both the normative and the odd, the canonized authors and the misfits, the island and its diaspora, Boricua Pop is a fascinating blend of low life and high culture: a highly original, challenging, and lucid new work by one of our most talented cultural critics.

Moving among theatre, experimental video, revolutionary protest, photography, poetry, and durational performance art, 'Ricanness' stages scenes in which the philosophical, social, and psychic come together at the site of aesthetics, against the colonization of time.