1 — The Workshop / The Museum

Taller Boricua was founded in 1970 as an artist run studio in El Barrio, by Marcos Dimas, Adrian García, Manuel “Neco” Otero, Martin Rubio, and Armando Soto, at the headquarters of the Real Great Society, an urban planning collective, on Madison Avenue at East 111^th Street. That same year, Dimas, Soto, Rubio, and García became advisors to the recently founded El Museo del Barrio. Together with Raphael Montañez Ortiz, one of the founders of El Museo, these artists had participated in the Puerto Rican Art Workers Coalition, which pushed for the representation of women artists and other minorities in New York museums. The posters and ephemera presented in this section, created by Taller Boricua artists, document the first years of collaboration between Taller and El Museo, including exhibitions during director Marta Moreno Vega’s tenure, such as Exposición Rodante, Taller Boricua, the group’s first exhibition in the museum, in 1972. During this shared history, there were also moments of disagreement between the two organizations. In the exhibition The Art Heritage of Puerto Rico: Pre-Columbian to the Present (1973), co-organized by El Museo and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, members from Taller Boricua organized a demonstration during the opening to protest against their exclusion from the show.

El Museo del Barrio on Third Avenue and East 106^th Street, with Loíza Aldea mural by Nitza Tufiño , 1973

Photographer unknown. El Museo del Barrio Archive, New York