Artist

Maximo Rafael Colón

Co-Curated By

Miguel & Mercedes Trelles

Genre / Type of Show

Art Exhibition

Date

November 14 – January 15

Opening Reception

November 14

Audience type

General audience

 Synopsis

This selection of photographs from photographer Máximo Rafael Colón’s vast oeuvre demonstrates Colón’s commitment to politics, portraiture, and the “cultural provocateurs”: the people who ignited and kept the flame of Puerto Rican culture in New York through institutions like Taller Boricua, the Nuyorian Poet’s Café and New York’s rich music and festival scene. The selection, from Máximo’s personal archive, also constitutes a love letter to analogue photography and the information rich, uncropped print that relies on the precise moment.

Harking from ” la Villa del Capitán Correa”, Arecibo/Puerto Rico, Máximo Rafael Colón moved to New York at a young age.  He started his formal training in the “darkroom arts” at the School of Visual Arts and from the get-go a unique trajectory started:  Colón’s profound concern with social justice has been portrayed by documentary photographs of sit-ins, the emergence of the Young Lords and the clamor of Latinos demanding equal rights. His images capture a period of upheaval and political ferment reflecting an unwavering commitment to Puerto Rican Nationalism and the struggle for the liberation of imprisoned Nationalists such as Carlos Feliciano, Andrés Figueroa Cordero, Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda and Irvin Flores Rodríguez.

Colón’s work was featured in the landmark photographic exhibition, Dos Mundos (1973) organized by the Institute of Contemporary Hispanic Art. He has participated in various prestigious exhibitions, among them,! Presente! The Young Lords (2015) at the Bronx Museum, the Museo del Barrio and the Loisaida Art Center, as well as Ida y Vuelta (2017) organized by the Museo de Antropología, Historia y Arte UPR, CitiCien, 100 artistas 100 años del Jones Act (2018) at the Clemente Soto Vélez, Casa Ruth and Taller Boricua, and El sujeto develado (2019) at the Museo de Arte Dr. Pío López Martínez.

Bios

Máximo Rafael Colón was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.  Colón is a New York based photographer who studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Colón’s photography speaks to his concerns of social justice, activism, and cultural expression which encapsulates a wide range of interest in music, the human condition and making visible the people of our society who are often marginalized through discrimination and inequality. His primary medium is analogue photography, Colón also creates assemblages in the found object tradition.  His works have been exhibited in several venues throughout New York City and Puerto Rico and a number of his photographs form part of the Centro De Estudios Puertorriqueños archives at CUNY Hunter College and of the permanent collection at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

In 2015, Colón’s photography was prominently featured in ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, and The Loisaida Center in Manhattan. Some of his photographs form part of the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños archives at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and his work has also been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York, Bronx Documentary Center, New York Cultural Center and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. He is currently editing My Upside-Down World: Deconstructing Photography, a five-year digital project encompassing photographs from New York, Puerto Rico, Berlin, Mainz, Paris, Havana, and Toronto His works can be found in numerous publications, film documentaries and are part of many private collections.

Mercedes Trelles Hernández is a professor of art history at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus, and an independent curator. She has written art criticism and edited several catalogues on the history of art in Puerto Rico. In 2015 she collaborated with Tate Modern, contributing an essay on Argentinean pop for The World Goes Pop. After spending three years as curator of the collection of the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, she has organized several independent exhibitions. She directed the Francisco Oller gallery from 2014 to 2018.

Miguel Trelles is a Puerto Rican visual artist who works in the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center, where he currently serves as co-executive director of Teatro LATEA and is the co-founder, co-producer, and head visual arts curator of the Borimix Puerto Rico Fest.  Trelles’ Chino-Latino painting series derives inspiration from classic Chinese painting along with Pre-Columbian and Latin American imagery.  On a parallel track to his paintings, the artist’s silk screens honor the Puerto Rican silkscreen tradition of the 2^nd half of the 20^th Century, their popular content is broadly Latino.

An adjunct professor at City Tech and Baruch College, Trelles has taught Studio Art at Hunter College and Brown University as well as Art History at Fairley Dickinson University and in several cities throughout China.

The work of Miguel Trelles has been exhibited in Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, San Juan, Santo Domingo, Havana, Tegucigalpa, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Chengdu.  Trelles’ paintings are part of the permanent collections of The Frost Art Museum (FIU) in Miami, El Museo del Barrio and Deutsche Bank in New York, the Fundación Gabarrón in Valladolid and in El Museo de Arte de Ponce and the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture in San Juan.