The Puerto Rican American photographer Sophie Rivera (1938-2021) is best-known for her 1978 Nuyorican Portraits. For the black-and-white sequence, she photographed Puerto Rican sitters in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighbourhood to uplift the Latinx diaspora in New York Metropolis.
Though she engaged with and celebrated Latinx communities, Rivera by no means needed her work to be confined to id politics. The truth is, a lot of her output was extremely experimental. Double Exposures, her first profession survey, reassesses Rivera’s observe, situating the artist inside the broader discourse of post-war pictures whereas foregrounding each her political activism and technical talent.
Whereas Rivera is under-recognised within the canon, Susanna V. Temkin, the present’s curator, says that calling her “unknown” is inaccurate. The artist labored throughout portraiture, photojournalism and experimental image-making, and exhibited extensively throughout her lifetime. She was actively concerned in artist-led actions in New York, and he or she labored with networks of Latinx and feminist photographers and group organisers.
Temkin attributes the genesis of the present to an enigmatic work Rivera donated to the museum within the late Eighties: the color {photograph} Alternators (1975, printed 1986). Rivera captured the picture from the within of a subway automobile whereas searching a window by graffiti. Alternators speaks to Rivera’s “expertise as a New Yorker, which she was by and thru”, Temkin says, in addition to her lengthy relationship with El Museo.
“I hope this present turns into a gap for additional research of Rivera’s work,” Temkin says. “Via each the analysis course of and the exhibition itself, there’s a lot extra to uncover.” She provides that Rivera’s writing additionally deserves higher consideration, “particularly the articles she printed within the Nineteen Seventies—the place she advocated for the liberty of ladies artists to exhibit nudes, for instance, simply as males have been capable of do.”
Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures, El Museo del Barrio, till 2 August
