"Don’t Bother Searching If There’s Been A Bitch Like Me": A Conversation with María José
María José, “Amor,” 2020, archival inkjet print, 24 x 18 inches. Courtesy of the artist and El Museo del Barrio, New York.
On a Tuesday afternoon, I found myself calling María José via Instagram. The Puerto Rican artist can be hard to get a hold of, she admits, but she’s working on it. After a few back and forths on different platforms, she interrupts a conversation we’re having on Instagram and says, “I’m free now?” She admits: “I’m very ephemeral, but I always show up and I show up magnificently.”
María José is a self-described poet, photographer, performer, activist, mother, musician, designer, warrior, among so many other things. “I’m an intentional and intuitive bitch,” she confidently declares, “and observant. With big eyes, a big heart, and a big mind.” Even over Instagram, she carries a presence and charisma that is undeniable; she knows herself and it shows. María José has received a deal of notoriety on the island and beyond, including a profile about House of Grace in TIME Magazine, the trans, queer collective of which she is a/the mother. I was curious about her photography and her artistic practice, especially after seeing her works in El Museo del Barrio’s Estamos Bien: La Trienal 20/21. I have a particular interest in her as a subject. In our fifth grade class, she brought the first digital camera I ever saw. The tiny camera could only make single digit megapixel images, but after living within the boundaries of film, it seemed limitless. They’ve always been an artist, and one that I admire. I left the island as I entered my teens, while María José grew into herself, including being one of the most visible transwomen in Puerto Rico. Now, after many years, she and her works are worthy of attention, and we’re overdue for a reintroduction.
María José has two photographs on display at Estamos Bien, on view until September 26, 2021: Papi (2020, archival inkjet print, 24x18 in.) and Love (2019, archival inkjet print, 24x18 in.). In Papi, her father stands behind a scratched plexiglass structure that looks like a desk or a bank teller’s box separating the photographer from the subject beyond the mediating camera lens. The environment betrays a certain kind of wealth: “Papi,” the photographer’s own father, is wearing a suit. He is standing in what appears to be a well-manicured backyard, with well manicured lawns in the background. Juxtaposed against Papi, is the intimate Love. The psychic distance apparent in Papi, the perceived coldness from the subject’s stare, how he holds his hands, his apparent discomfort, and tense expression are all completely absent from Love. In Love, two people are kneeling in the middle of a road, approaching to kiss. They’re wearing yellow shirts and blue shorts. Unlike the manicured landscape in Papi, Love is set in el campo, where the lush, verdant landscape literally interrupts the infrastructure (the paved road) as a flood stream forms a small cascade. In a Junta governed, post-María Puerto Rico, queer love can triumph amidst the uncertainty of capitalist colonialism, much like nature can triumph over man’s interventions. The photograph rejects the binaries and social order imposed by the imperial cis-heteropatriarchy. Love exists against those odds, in spite of those odds, and to spite those odds.
“I think my practice informs who I am,” she begins, “ I feel deeply, observe carefully, and embody intentionally. Photography is the art of observing; poetry is the art of feeling and putting word into feeling; and performance is the art of embodying. I’m a highly sensitive girl.”
Her photographs pack layers of poetry, they tell a story. Her poems conjure images, and are performances in and of themselves, like when she delivered a speech/poem during the Summer 2019 Ricky Renuncia protests. Her performances, including voguing the house down boots, physically and kinetically express her poetic spirit, and her expertise in composing visual forms. It’s no wonder that when I asked her which artists have influenced her, she jumped to the surrealists.
“I consider myself, as an artist, a surrealist, first and foremost. In my art education, I always gravitated towards surrealism, and the surrealists...but they were all assholes!” She concludes with a laugh. Who is she influenced by? “I would say Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp—who did drag! And loved dada. Dada is the camp of art history.” Duchamp’s alter-ego “Rrose Sélavy,” has been immortalized in Man Ray’s photographs both as a hyper-feminized cosmopolitan French woman, and as a much more masculine presenting “man in a dress.” Duchamp seems like a fitting ancestor to María José, and not merely in his irreverent gender play. When asked by New Yorker art critic Calvin Tomkins about why it appeared that Duchamp didn’t really believe in art, despite having a life full of it, Duchamp replied “I don’t believe in art, I believe in artists,” which is a fitting summary of María José’s own philosophy.
“I seek to find ways to decolonize the medium. I see my presence in the field as an attempt to decolonize.” There’s this ongoing question for María José, “how can what I do be a social practice? And the answer for me is to redistribute wealth.”
María José, Papi (2020, archival inkjet print, 24x18 in.). Courtesy of the artist and El Museo del Barrio, New York.
When given opportunities and platforms to discuss her art, she would rather not. She’s done with professionalism, and these questions that ask her to make herself digestible, quantifiable, and understandable, in “rows and columns,” like she can be reduced to an Excel spreadsheet. “Isn’t what you see enough?,” she declares, “isn’t what you feel enough?” She refuses to be the art world’s token trans girl. The representation of trans artists in exhibitions is not enough for institutions to claim allyship with trans people.
“[Merely including trans artists] is not redistributing the resources that you already have. You have to be actively redistributing those resources to trans people in Puerto Rico. I would not like to demand, but there's a lot that we need. Not that I need, that my friends need, my poor friends, and as someone with access to spaces, platforms, people, and connections, I am going to try to really pull this [redistribution of resources] off. But also, I deserve this. I am a great artist, and I’m not only great, I’m also unique, and not in the ways that it is unimportant to be unique, but I am a transwoman in Puerto Rico after all. Don’t bother searching if there’s been a bitch like me [in these art spaces]… There has not been!” She may be one of the first, but refuses to be the last. “I won’t let myself become the end of that space [for trans people] that needs to be nurtured and expanded, and which will require a redistribution of resources and power.”
María José is clear on how her own family’s wealth has contributed to her success. She spoke about having access to shelter, to food, to the very basics needed for human survival. But she also had access to film, to equipment, to developing the film, and to an elite education in one of the most expensive private universities in the United States. But she uses that privilege and those opportunities to prioritize others.
“People need to have a larger sense of urgency when it comes to supporting, centering, empowering, enriching. There needs to be an urgency, in all levels of our society, of really supporting, centering, empowering, and enriching the voices of the whole nine [yards] for immigrant, trans, Black, feminine people.
“People are dying.” Puerto Rico leads the United States in transphobic murders. When we began our conversation, she spoke of the “third girl” she knew to die recently. I asked María José if she felt any risks associated with being so hypervisible as a trans woman in Puerto Rico.
“I think what’s tricky about trans women is that we look so beautiful, and so powerful. We emanate inner power. Aside from, of course, people wanting to murder me, I risk people projecting on my identity this false idea of who I am, or not having a full representation of what’s going on in my life. With fame comes idealization.” The risks, including the ever present threat of transfemicide, feel minimal to the artist compared to the urgency of now.
“When it comes to creating spaces for people that are less fortunate than you, blazing trails for people that maybe have no access to fire to blaze it themselves, it really is a responsibility. And I feel like white people, and people with class privilege always think of the work that we have to do as a sacrifice and not a responsibility. It sucks to be the only trans person in a room, feeling constantly misunderstood, having to put in the emotional and material labor of putting myself in the front lines, but, it’s not really a time to be at peace. You know? We can foster inner peace, but also people are dying. People are dying. Black trans people need spaces to live, and be, and work. There’s a lot of extreme poverty in Puerto Rico. So…when I look at the entire picture, I’m actually really thankful that I get to play a part in this.”
María José is writing her own narrative, and centering others in the process, while uplifting herself. At her core, she is still an artist, a poet, a dreamer, while also being a warrior, a guardian, and an activist.
“I think what art can offer is quite important to humankind. People have to say what they want to say, what they want to feel, what they want to put on a canvas, what they want to write, how they want to move in a space. I feel like these are contributions that are being missed out on, because there’s no systemic support for these people who want to die, who are working at fast food chains for $7.25 an hour. But I have marvelous gifts, and those people that are close to me. I’m just really passionate about uplifting other trans, Puerto Rican trans artists, working on decolonization, anti-racism, anti-capitalism, the abolition of the binary. I believe in that, and I get to do it.”
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María José is one of the featured artists in El Museo del Barrio’s El Trienal 20/21: Estamos Bien, on view until September 2021.
Laura Suárez is a writer, curator, consultant, researcher, producer. She graduated from Tufts University in 2014 with a degree in Philosophy and a minor in Art History. In 2014, she co-founded curatorial pop-up project Moth and Moon with artist and poet Will Farris. Her art historical research focuses on social and politically engaged art works from Latin America and its diaspora, particularly from the Caribbean. She writes about moral duties, arte útil, race and racism, and anti/imperialism. She has worked as a sensitivity reader for major publications. Laura served as an Associate Producer for When We Gather, an art project initiated by María Magdalena Campos Pons. Born in Puerto Rico, Suárez is currently based in Boston, MA.