large-scale installations. Born in Puerto Rico, he moved to NYC to further his education where his early assignments as a social worker construed a sharp reaffirmation of his cultural heritage and a genuine compromise with the issues that affected Latino communities in the United States. Tiffany Lopez’s article for Art Journal comments upon Osorio’s commitment with his community:
Consequently, Osorio began the practice of conceiving and developing his ornate installations with the help of youth groups, community movements and social service providers seeking out to deliberately extend the reaches of the art world into the Puerto Rican barrios. His life size dioramas provided an immersed insight into the afflictions of the Nuyorican citizenry. For his most emblematic video inclusive installations, En la barbería no se llora (There is no crying in the barbershop), 1994 and Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime), 1993, Osorio would address a manifold narrative alluding at the realm of Latino culture by utilizing police reports, video images of grown men crying, decorated barber’s chairs, video images contained inside a mirror invoking orishas and a plethora of significance implying trinkets. The accessibility and familiarity of his pieces announce an aperture towards more humane and/or sincere depictions of Latinos, while also unmasking a difficult macho mentality by way of questioning its constrictive idioms. Osorio’s work is too far reaching to be contained in this account, but his presence in the art world market and commitment with his identity opened up the doors for other Puerto Rican artists working in the island. Repeating Islands Rewind-Rewind: Video Arte Puertorriqueño trailed along the 2000’s as the first
Revista del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña|Tercera Serie|Número 2
It was in the early 1990s, however, that Osorio began to incorporate video into his mixed-media work about Latino popular culture, beginning with his installation Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime) shown in the 1993 Whitney Biennial. His selection marked his entrance into the mainstream art world, and significantly, it also marked his shift to the use of video, from his own performing body, as a cultural mediator. His Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?) was featured in the New York Times’ review of the biennial, which tied Osorio’s work in with the major criticism launched against the show. The controversy around the biennial concerning what kind of works-and by extension, which social groups-could enter the dominant cultural museum space influenced Osorio’s decision not to show new work in mainstream museums until it had been first shown in his community. This decision was also influenced by his realization that though his contribution brought the museum’s attention to the artistic cultural production of Puerto
Ricans, it did not in and of itself bring Puerto Ricans into the museum.23
Lopez, Tiffany. “Imagining Community: Video in the Installation Work of Pepon Osorio.” Art Journal, no. 54 (1995), page 58. 23
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