Mi corazón latiente: Pepón Osorio at the New Museum [REVIEW]
“Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart/Mi corazón latiente,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
On view at the New Museum, Pepón Osorio presented his most comprehensive show to date, “My Beating Heart (Mi corazón latiente)”, exhibiting what’s been weighing on his mind throughout the last 30 years of his career. The show opens with a heart-shaped piñata suspended in the air, Osorio’s “Beating Heart” from which the exhibition gets its title, thumps and its resonating pulse directs the audience to reflect on themes of injustice and inequality within education and healthcare systems, toxic masculinity, the representation of marginalized communities, and class and racial struggles through his signature installations. Self-contained rooms reproducing a crime scene inside a family home, a child’s bedroom and his father’s prison cell, a local barber shop, and a public school classroom filled with objects and images give testimony to various processes of communal engagement and personal growth. Osorio’s larger-than-life assemblages turn up the volume of the vibrancy and familiarity that accumulated objects carry, emphasizing the value and intrinsic meanings that material culture holds at both a consumerist and spiritual level for those who have little else to hold onto. For Osorio, no object is without life.
In a video promoting the New Museum on social media, Osorio shares stories from his time as a social worker in New York City:
“I began to visit many homes, I don’t know, maybe 4,000 homes, and I smelled trouble, or I smelled safety, or I smelled spirituality. You know, there is something about the use of color, and the composition of homes, and the placement of furniture, that I was able to tell what was going on at a glance at the door frame.”
Pepón Osorio, My Beating Heart / Mi corazón latiente. Exhibition view: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, 2000.
Osorio carefully analyzed every detail while attending case after case. He paid close attention to the common denominators and material cues that shaped the families he worked with, many of whom were from Latino and Black communities similar to his own migrant experience in the city. He encountered situations marked by abuse, neglect, and unstable living conditions, which led him to rethink his role as an artist while approaching the world as a social worker.
But Osorio’s installations also offer counterpoint within them that further contextualize the colorful environments he presents. Most noticeably, in “Badge of Honor,” the exuberance emanating from a teenage boy’s bedroom, filled with toys, trophies, and walls plastered with baseball cards and movie posters, is contrasted by the cold, empty reality of his father’s prison cell. From within these two, adjacent rooms, Osorio presents projections of a filmed conversation between an incarcerated father at New Jersey’s Northern State Prison and his teenage son at their family home. The artist traveled back and forth over several weeks, sharing footage with each to capture a distanced, yet intimate exchange. At one point, the son states, “Dad, I would be willing to give up anything for you to just be home with us.” Hearing this, one could envisage him resigning to trade everything in his room in exchange for his dad’s return. At that moment, the wall separating the two fades away, leaving us with the essence of love and longing from this bond between father and son.
“Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart/Mi corazón latiente,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
The projects are then pretexts for interventions within the social fabric’s status quo, gathering people with overlapping or connected experiences in order to better understand their circumstances. Each engagement takes extended periods of time and entails different activities, requiring Osorio to be vulnerable and intentionally present with his collaborators. These give rise to the few, yet large montages that stand as testimony to these processes, while the processes themselves could be considered his true artworks. This is especially the case in Ososrio’s “reForm (2014-17).” After intentionally giving up driving, Osorio would bike everywhere to become better connected to his surroundings and his neighbors in Philadelphia. In doing so, he came across a closed school in Fairhill, inspiring him to meet with its community. He organized a dinner and other events to gather students and families who were part of that school, inviting them to reimagine ways to revitalize the classroom, reflect on its power to gather people and share knowledge, and talk about policies, the kids’ futures, and what they believed school should be. In having these conversations, they asked the city and were granted access to re-enter the closed school. They claimed all the objects of a single classroom: desks, cubbies, even the chalkboard, gathering everything that makes up this space and recreating it within another room at the university where Osorio teaches. He used his own resources and position within the community to help convey the emotional layers of those personally affected so that others in the community would acknowledge the significance of this lost space, and question the systems that made this happen. During this process, Osorio became aware of his experience with the education system growing up, recognizing the same fractures and lack of effort placed in schools that these students receive today.
“Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart/Mi corazón latiente,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
In offering large-scale installations of domestic and other intimate environments that co-opt gallery spaces, Osorio performs a dual intention where he criticizes the art world he participates in and recontextualizes these spaces in order to analyze and exalt the people inhabiting them, as well as the narratives that influence their destinies. Although the museum makes evident through its wall texts that it acknowledges the artist's effort to elevate the voices of marginalized communities in the US, particularly those who have struggled to secure and protect their space in this country, the display of Osorio's artworks on the New Museum's 2nd floor does not reflect that to its best capacity. Upon opening the elevator doors to the exhibition’s location, visitors are unexpectedly welcomed by the artist’s most recent (and still in progress) piece, “Convalescence,” (2023) an installation that explores Osorio’s recent, personal experiences with illness and the US healthcare system. Though one may argue that it’s meant to feel claustrophobic or entail shock value, the uncomfortable proximity to the installation of “Convalescence” moves viewers to quickly walk past the artwork in this makeshift foyer and into the next space.
“Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart/Mi corazón latiente,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
Overall, his works subvert the implied dynamics of separation between formal art spaces and the realities outside of them, creating experiences that exude beauty that coexists with anger and frustration. This is an element that Osorio highlights in “Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?),” where he criticizes the violence committed through American mass media’s representation of Latino communities. His artworks overtake the white cube to address the realities outside these decontextualized spaces—realities that those with power at institutional spaces have historically disregarded. Unfortunately, the art world's disregard for Latino artists and communities is somewhat perpetuated through this presentation of Osorio’s works. The show could have benefitted from (at least) one additional floor, giving each piece more breathing room, which in turn, would provide the audience with a more fluid experience for viewing and contemplation. Although the artist’s installations often require a copious accumulation of objects to reach his goals, the exhibition feels cluttered, starting at the moment the museum’s elevator doors open to the floor where the works are present.
“Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart/Mi corazón latiente,” 2023. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
Nonetheless, Osorio’s pieces shine and stop you in your tracks with their sheer power and exuberance. He creates installations because they act beyond something just hanging on the wall. Each artwork in this show offers a window into various parts of society, asking us to question our relationships with them and reflect on our values and concerns as part of this social body. And in return, we begin to view barber shops, jail cells, and classrooms in a different light when we encounter them out in the real world. As a migrant who struggled to learn the language and the culture of his new home many years ago, this extensive exhibition shows how Osorio found his place as an artist, even within his displacement.
Sebastián Meltz-Collazo is a writer, visual artist, and musician working towards new experiences through the intersection of narratives. Connecting personal with collective histories, he explores iterations of visual culture and representation with the intention of raising questions around identity and its various manifestations. He is a graduate of Image Text Ithaca and is based in New York & Puerto Rico.