Ana Cristina Perry

My dissertation examines Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s artistic and curatorial projects from 1966 to 1972. I argue that he developed these works to provoke emotional responses as a strategy of institutional critique and in response to the racial and economic inequities that he witnessed throughout New York City. Ortiz wrote about how institutional spaces suppressed emotion and affect by prioritizing “the passive aesthetic of the cerebral.” Ortiz instead sought to center the body and its physiological urge to act out in response to often challenging or contradictory emotions and feelings. My dissertation takes into account the dual audiences and communities Ortiz worked with from 1966 through 1972. I first focus on Ortiz’s participation in “white” vanguard art spaces: the 1966 Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) in London and the Judson Memorial Church Gallery in New York (1967–1970). I position Ortiz as a central figure who not only employed strategies similar to those of his more well-known peers such as Allan Kaprow or Nam June Paik but also drew from his background as a Puerto Rican to deepen the political implications of the other artists’ work, and in so doing I expand our understanding of the downtown avant-garde. I also examine the projects Ortiz created with a broader network of educators, artists, and activists at the community-oriented Puerto Rican cultural space of El Museo del Barrio (1969–1972) and the 1971 landmark exhibit Boricua: Aquí y Allá (Boricua: Here and There) at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Through these projects, I demonstrate how Ortiz developed strategies of institutional critique with the downtown vanguard and employed these strategies to build a critical museum within an art world that remained hostile to Puerto Ricans in New York.

This fellowship received Federal support from the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center.