Dos Mundos: (Re) Constructing Narratives

June 21 - October 30, 2021

A SUNY-traveling exhibition organized by En Foco  |  Curated by Juanita Lanzo & Stephanie Lindquist
Presenting nearly 40 photographs by 12 artists of color who explore issues of struggle, migration and representation.

Featured Artists: Damarys Alvarez | Laylah Amatullah Barrayn | Tau Battice | Yu-Chen Chiu | Anthony Hamboussi | Daesha Harris | Erika Morillo | Danny Ramon Peralta | Antonio Pulgarin | Roger Richardson | Cinthya Santos-Briones | Aaron Turner 

Events:

Panel Discussion: Monday, September 27, 2:45pm
Panelists: Co-curator Juanita Lanzo; artists Cinthya Santos-Briones, Tau Battice, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn; moderated by Professor Lori Flores

Hispanic Heritage Month Opening Event: Wednesday, October 6, 1-2:20pm
Featuring Dos Mundos artists Erika Morillo and Danny Peralta, student performances, food and festivities. Open to Stony Brook  University faculty, staff, and students . 

Art Crawl: Saturday, October 23, 1-3pm (begins at 1pm at the Wang Center, then 1:30 at the Zuccaire Gallery)
Free tours of campus art galleries. Click here for details.

Artist Talk: Thursday, October 28, 4pm (Zoom event)
Virtual artist talk with Antonio Pulgarin. Sponsored by the Art History Graduate Student Organization

Listen to the artists speak about their work on the Dos Mundos Media page.

Press Kit

Nearly 50 years after Puerto Rican photographers createdthe first Dos Mundos exhibition in a New York art scene that did not represent them, En Foco’s fellowship recipients continue the work of offering fresh visions that contest mainstream perspectives. Evolving to contemporary circumstances and inequities exacerbated by the pandemic, they maintain their commitments to their communities and individual photographic processes. Many of them are also leaders, nurturing other artists of color across the diaspora, in the South, the Bronx, classrooms, and beyond. Dos Mundos: (Re)constructing Narratives features 12 artists that center stories at the fringe of public attention: hidden sanctuaries, subcultures, painful identities, far-away homes, spirituality, transcendence, broken promises, and all too easily ignored social ecologies.

Cinthya Santos Briones’ work literally transports us to those Living in Sanctuary in churches in New York and New Mexico, sheltering them from the continued threat of deportation and separation from their families. Welcoming us to the Bronx’s underground Hip-Hop scene, Danny Peralta introduces us to his collaborators at Guerrilla Grooves Radio station in The Best Damn Rap. Damarys Alvarez offers us a rare glimpse of subversive youth Punks in communist Cuba. Combining his search for Black art with formal considerations of light, line, shape, and form, Aaron Turner  uses diverse strategies in his film photography series Black Alchemy including installation, digital manipulation, and drawing. Antonio Pulgarin presents us with visually layered family photographs that navigate the boundary between masculineconstructions and queer realities. Known for his portraits from Harlem through Latin America, Tau Battice displays the pride and integrity of community members in his series from his home Liamuiga, the indigenous name of St. Kitts. Documentary photographer Laylah Amatullah Barrayn focuses our sight on Black and Muslim women confidently unveiling their spirit in her frequent travels across the world from Senegal to Brooklyn. In the intimate series,Umbral ErikaMorillo exposes her sole son’s negotiation of fantasy and reality between this world and another. Daesha Harris submerges our view below water following Black feet in their journey to freedom. In the face of growing social divides, Roger Richardson delicately holds together tender moments within this community in his series Let Me So Love. With clarity, Yu-Chen Chiu exposes a broken political system and American dream under the Trump administration. Through iconically empty space around Coney Island Housing Projects Anthony Hamboussi links together stories of urban relationships to the local environment and disparate understandings of safety in a complicated web of social ecology.

Together these artists are working to decolonize the photographic image, exposing structures of oppression, queerying their subjects’ identities and refusals within them, and celebrating their kin’s freedom and love.

Read more about the Dos Mundos travelling exhibition at the En Foco web site:
https://enfoco.org/current-exhibition/dos-mundos/

Top: Dos Mundos: (Re)Constructing Narratives at the Zuccaire Gallery

Above: Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, Maajeida, 2020

Right: Roger Richardson, Untitled, Let Me Sow Love Series, 2018

Below: Daesha Harris, How I Got Over, One More River to Cross Series, 2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dos Mundos programs are supported by a Stony Brook University Mini-Grant for Departmental Diversity Initiatives and Drs. Barry and Bobbi Coller. The 2021-2022 exhibition season is supported by a generous grant from the Paul W. Zuccaire Foundation, with additional support from the Friends of Staller Center.