Histories We Carry

Amid the vicissitudes of urban living and the unsettling specter of displacement, Estelle Maisonett’s work asks existential questions about our place in the urban landscape. It encourages us to find answers in the materiality of the city. Her snapshots of everyday life in the Bronx are assembled from fabrics, found objects, and industrial detritus. Her remix of accumulated articles as varied as air ducts, a Yankees logo, and stylized urban street wear captures the city’s lost histories, changing cultural terrain, and evolving architectural fabric. 

In life-sized, yet intimate collages of home, like Tracing Roots, Maisonette layers photographs, sacred objects, and texts that capture the spirit of her Puerto Rican and Mexican parents’ Bronx apartment. The work’s multi-layered elements and themes reference “The Bronx is Burning,” Puerto Rican liberation, Mexican American history, and the syncretic spiritual traditions of the Americas.  

Maisonett’s kaleidoscopes of found objects awaken the histories we carry subconsciously within us that shape our frames of reference, our sense of who we are, and our relationship to the world around us. 

Historical Abyss captures the shadowy crucible and political erasure of Puerto Rico’s colonization by Spain and the United States. It nods to the Young Lords’ cry for independence through the figure of Don Pedro Albizu Campos, founder of the Nationalist Party for Puerto Rican independence and a distant relative of the artist.  

The series In My Hood, made of galvanized steel air ducts discarded and found in the New York Life Insurance Company, is an exploration of working-class buildings facing gentrification in Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. 

Ventana de Luz (Window of Light) and Just Like Grandma Used to Make em’ are odes to the artist’s abuelita, a light in her life and pillar of cultural and ancestral history, who sold pasteles en hoja, coquito, limbe, and icy’s from her window in Hunts Point, a longstanding Puerto Rican neighborhood in the Bronx, and one of the world’s largest food-distribution marketplaces. 

Estelle Maisonett’s discarded urban materials elude official archives and defy historical accounts. And the visual stories she weaves with them prompt viewers to contemplate how mundane objects and fragmented narratives, purposely curated, might define community, the heartbeat of a neighborhood, or the soul of the city and offer a way of recuperating history. 

Curated by Johanna Fernández