Coco Fusco, La Plaza Vacía (The Empty Plaza), 2012. Video, 12 min; Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York; Acquisition enabled by VEZA New Media Fund 2022 and headline supporters South SOUTH and Niio.
Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island – September 17, 2025—January 11, 2026
Jangueando: Recent Acquisitions, 2021-2025 – August 28, 2025—Summer 2026
El Museo del Barrio is thrilled to announce its fall exhibitions: Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island and Jangueando: Recent Acquisitions, 2021-2025. Together, these exhibitions reaffirm El Museo’s commitment to presenting exhibitions that speak to the depth, resilience, and richness of Latinx and Latin American culture. Coco Fusco’s incisive body of work reminds us of the power of art to challenge dominant narratives and amplify stories that are often silenced. At the same time, Jangueando celebrates the collective spirit of our Permanent Collection—a testament to the creative vitality and cultural complexity of the artists we champion. Together, these exhibitions reaffirm El Museo’s role as a space for critical dialogue, celebration, and solidarity.
Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island
El Museo del Barrio is proud to present the first U.S. survey of influential Cuban-American artist, writer, and activist Coco Fusco (b. 1960, lives in New York). A renowned artist, writer, and activist, Fusco has been globally lauded for her distinctly perceptive, acerbic, and piercing voice. Since the 1990s, her films, photographs, texts, installations, and performances have addressed the dynamics of politics and power in relation to issues of representation, culture, and institutional critique. The exhibition will include more than three decades of Fusco’s artistic production, positioning her as one of the foremost artists shaping the contemporary art field. Spanning her now-canonical performance “Two Undiscovered Amerindians Discover the West” (presented with Guillermo Gomez-Peña) to her on-going investigation of post-revolutionary Cuban history and her most recent photographic explorations around U.S. politics, the show will offer an expansive view of her multidisciplinary career.
Borrowing its title from the artist’s recent monograph publication, Tomorrow, I will Become an Island is organized at El Museo del Barrio by Susanna V. Temkin, interim chief curator, and Rodrigo Moura, former chief curator.
“Coco Fusco is one of the most vital and uncompromising voices in contemporary art. Through her fearless and multifaceted practice, she has consistently challenged dominant narratives and exposed the deeply rooted systems that shape our understanding of power. With this landmark exhibition, El Museo del Barrio proudly honors Fusco’s legacy as a trailblazing Cuban-American artist, intellectual, and cultural critic, whose work continues to provoke, inspire, and ignite dialogue at a critical moment.” — Patrick Charpenel, Executive Director, El Museo del Barrio
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. She is a recipient of a 2023 Free Speech Defender Award from the National Coalition Against Censorship, a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award, a 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship, a 2021 Anonymous Was a Woman award, a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.
Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented at the 56th Venice Biennale, the Sharjah Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008, and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Whitney Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona.
Fusco is the author of numerous books, and she contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and numerous art publications. Her monograph publication Tomorrow, I will Become an Island was published by Thames & Hudson in 2023.
Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985), and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007). She is a Professor at the Cooper Union School of Art.
SPONSORS
Tomorrow, I will Become an Island is supported by the Ford Foundation and The Jacques & Natasha Gelman Foundation and organized by El Museo del Barrio in collaboration with MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.
Jangueando: Recent Acquisitions, 2021-2025
Opening this August, Jangueando: Recent Acquisitions, 2021–2025 debuts recently accessioned works to El Museo del Barrio’s Permanent Collection. Meaning “hanging out with your friends,” the Spanglish title plays on multiple definitions including socializing and installing artworks in a gallery setting. At a time when many of the communities represented by El Museo del Barrio are under attack, these multiple interpretations of the word imply both solidarity and a political call to action through holding space and kinship.
From the street to the club, the exhibition invites viewers to reflect on places of gathering. It invokes questions about precarity and strength. It asks us to place ourselves within expansive cosmologies and opens communal ways of thinking. El jangueo allows us to imagine alternative ways of being together.
“Through the generosity of collectors, donors, foundations, and artists, El Museo del Barrio’s Permanent Collection has grown by almost 350 works over the past four years.” says Susanna V.Temkin, Interim Chief Curator. “Jangueando is intended to reflect a playful yet conceptually rigorous introduction to a selection of these new artworks, on view in Las Galerias for the first time.”
Jangueando features approximately 30 works across diverse media—painting, photography, sculpture, and installation—and cultural perspectives, organized into thematic clusters. Select groupings build on the museum’s historical strengths, such as Puerto Rican and Nuyorican portraiture and Latinx photography. The exhibition highlights the evolution of the museum’s collecting strategy, including renewed focus on queer artists and those of Indigenous descent.
Artists whose works will be on view in the exhibition include william cordova (1971, Lima, Peru; lives in Miami, FL, Danielle de Jesus (1987, Bushwick, NY; lives in Brooklyn, NY), Mundo Meza (1955, Tijuana, Mexico – 1985, Los Angeles, CA), Carlos Motta (1978, Bogotá, Colombia; lives in New York, NY), and Daiara Tukano (1982, São Paulo; lives in São Paulo).
The exhibition is organized at El Museo del Barrio by Zuna Maza, Lee Sessions, and Susanna V. Temkin, of the Curatorial Department.
ABOUT EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO
El Museo del Barrio is the nation’s leading Latinx and Latin American cultural institution. The Museum welcomes visitors of all backgrounds to discover the artistic landscape of these communities through its extensive Permanent Collection, varied exhibitions and publications, bilingual public programs, educational activities, festivals, and special events. The Museum is located at 1230 Fifth Avenue at 104th Street in New York City.
The Museum is open Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 11:00am – 5:00pm. Pay what you wish. To connect with El Museo via social media, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and X. For more information, please visit www.elmuseo.org.
Related
Discover more from City Life Org
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
