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Struggle to See Arte Latino

Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum closes today at The Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami, Florida.

Arte Latino highlights more than 200 years of Latino art from across the United States. These sixty-six paintings, sculptures, and photographs represent many different cultural traditions developed by mostly Spanish-speaking artists who have settled in America.

"As a photographer," Joseph Rodríguez says, "I am interested in the struggles of life with a strong emphasis on things that have affected my life: poverty, religion, drugs, violence, death." In Puerto Rican Flag a girl stands in the doorway of a row of derelict storefronts. Boarded-up windows and peeling paint attest to the area's poverty. In ironic contrast, a flag of Puerto Rico, the original homeland of many of the residents of Spanish Harlem where Rodríguez took this photograph, is the brightest element in the composition.

Source: Virginia Mecklenburg. Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).

Pictured: Joseph Rodríguez, born 1951, Puerto Rican Flag, 1986, chromogenic photograph on paper, 12 x 18 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist.