Máximo Rafael Colón: Storied Lens
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 14 @ 6:00 - 9:00 PM
When: November 14, 2024 – January 15, 2025
Where: The Tamayo Gallery in Teatro LATEA @ The Clemente
107 Suffolk Street, NYC
Curators: Mercedes Trelles and Miguel Trelles
Artist: Máximo Rafael Colón
Join us for the XIXth Edition of BORIMIX: Nuyorican Splendor, celebrating the agency and the trailblazing trajectory of Puerto Ricans in New York.
The BORIMIX Visual Arts Exhibition, Storied Lens, is co-curated by Mercedes Trelles and Miguel Trelles, and will be devoted, for the first time ever, to the work of one artist, Máximo Rafael Colón. Support for the exhibition provided by LXNY/Historias.
"People are constantly going on about the flag. And that’s a starting point, a way of being proud. But I wish they would identify with the history."
- Máximo Rafael Colón
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.
Don’t miss the conversation series, Sharing the Spotlight, in tandem with the Storied Lens exhibition, also co-presented by Historias!
When: Saturdays November 16, November 23, December 7, December 14, January 4 @ 2:00-4:00 PM
Where: Teatro LATEA at The Clemente
Sharing the Spotlight is a series of talks by 5 emerging Latinx artists/photographers, organized in conjunction with Maximo Rafael Colón: Storied Lens exhibition, co-curated by Miguel & Mercedes Trelles.
Program and Invited Artists Schedule:
Saturday, Nov. 16
2-4 pm
Mercedes Trelles in conversation with Maximo Rafael Colón.
An in-depth interactive conversation between “Storied Lens” co-curator Mercedes Trelles (University of Puerto Rico) and Maximo Rafael Colón. They will discuss Colón’s photo practice, his trajectory, the selection of photographs in “Storied Lens” and upcoming projects.
Colón is the ideal artist provocateur that has always been in the forefront of social justice and community empowerment. His photographs span over forty years dedicated to the wellbeing of the Puerto Rican and Latino community.
As part of the Borimix 2024 Storied Lens Exhibition at LATEA, Colón has extended an invitation to a select group of Latino emerging photographers to share the spotlight in a series of artist talks where they will present and discuss their work.
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.
Maximo 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 EstudiosPuertorriqueños 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 EstudiosPuertorriqueños 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.
Saturday, Nov. 23
Artist talk: Destiny Mata
Destiny Mata is a Mexican American photographer and filmmaker based in her native New York City focusing on issues of subculture and community. After studying photojournalism at LaGuardia Community College and San Antonio College, she spent two years as Director of Photography Programs at the Lower Eastside Girls Club. Mata recently has been awarded the Magnum Foundation Fellowship 2023. She exhibited La Vida En Loisaida: Life on the Lower East Side, a solo exhibition at Photoville Festival 2020, ICP Concerned Global Images for Global Crisis at the International Center of Photography 2020, and Mexic-Arte Museum. She is currently preparing a series of documentary works continuing her exploration of the fabric of the communities around her. Among the work to be discussed will be, Lower East Side Yearbook, a collaborative multimedia project led by residents of Lower East Side public housing.
Saturday, Dec. 7
Artist talk: Amy Ponce and Mario Rubén Carrión
Amy Ponce was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, by Boricua parents. She received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Amy’s work has been focused on documenting the various facets of her Boricua roots and culture. Her work includes self-portraiture, mixed media, collage, video, and music. As an Arts Educator and community activist, she has always encouraged the art of storytelling via our “own lens”. Amy is also a member of the Nuyorican band Abrazos Army and has lent her voice to several social justice causes and cultural groups in NYC. Her work has been exhibited at the Gordon Parks Gallery at the College of New Rochelle, Boricua College, the Bronx Latin American Art Biennial, and other group exhibitions. She works out of her studio home in the Lower Hudson Valley, NY.
Mario Rubén Carrión is an artist and cultural worker from Caguas, Puerto Rico now based in Brooklyn, NY. As a photographer and filmmaker, he has documented the Latine community of New York City for over a decade, navigating the worlds of music, nightlife and organizing. He has led teams of visual artists in documenting Afro Latino Festival NYC and the New York Latino Film Festival (NYLFF). Mario edited the award-winning documentary “We Still Here/Nos Tenemos” in 2021 and has since written and directed his first fiction short film, “Record Shop”, which recently wrapped its film festival run. He is currently the New Media Manager at the Caribbean Cultural Center & African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) in Harlem, NY.
Saturday, Dec. 14
Artist talk: Maylyn “Zero” Iglesias
Maylyn “Zero” Iglesias is a Nuyorican photographer, educator, archivist and curator born and raised on the Lower East Side. Her early sensibilities were formed in New York City by 1980’s graffiti, hip hop, punk and her mother’s Salsa and Supremes records. She graduated from LaGuardia Community College with an Associates Degree in Commercial Photography. Iglesias' work is focused on her beloved Loisaida with the aim of documenting remnants of the quickly disappearing Nuyorican culture that once thrived so boldly in her youth. Her personal project, “What’s It Mean to be Nuyorican” was added to the LaGuardia Wagner Archives in 2021. During that time she joined the Loisaida Center to head their newly-launched archive program, which was created to preserve the history of LES photographers, poets, musicians and neighborhood leaders and activists. Among the photographers whose work Iglesias is digitizing is Marlys Momber’s photographs. Her own art and photography has been shown in New York, New Orleans and London. Maylyn has co-taught photography workshops and been a teaching and darkroom assistant at ICP, the Free Film Project, Lower East Side Girls Club and the Josephine Herrick Project.
Saturday, Jan. 4
Artist talk: Jon Ferrer
Jon Ferrer is a freelance photographer from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, N.Y. Jon has and will continue to shoot any genre of photography as long as there's an opportunity to learn, but his first love is for the streets of New York. Jon has been a part of multiple group showings with galleries such as Art on the Ave, The Muse Gallery, and La Sala de Pepe. He is a first-place winner of the 2024 Veterans Creative Arts Competition in multiple categories and had a successful solo photography exhibition this past summer. Ferrer’s talk will be about a photographic journey through darkness and light. As a poor Hispanic child from a single-parent home who grew to be a combat war veteran, he has faced a good share of trauma. This is his perspective on the connection between art and mental health