Legendary painter Manny Vega is back in East Harlem doing what he does best: creating another mural masterwork

Award winning artist and muralist Manny Vega is creating a memorial mural to a Spanish Harlem icon, the late Dr. Antonia Pantoja. Vega, a sculptor, painter, illustrator, printmaker, costume and set designer, is also highly sought as an instructor at El Museo del Barrio, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the American Museum of Natural History and the Caribbean Cultural Center.

When he was a kid, Manny Vega used to sneak into the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“At 11 years old I used to make the trek from Third Avenue and 97th St. to the Met,” Vega said. “I used to sneak in look at all the Greek statues. I would go regularly. The guards would see me and say, ‘This kid is here again?’

“I would get home and get a whipping from my father, and then the next day do it again.”

Manuel Vega Sr. probably thought he had reason to worry about his eccentric son, who picked up sewing by watching his mother Elena, a seamstress, make clothes on the machine next to his bed and was partial to playing Conga drums around the neighborhoods in the Bronx and East Harlem the family called home.

“I was always the artist in the group,” Vega said. “It came from watching my mother sew, watching my sister do bead work. It was just monkey see, monkey do.”

Papa need not have worried.

Manny Vega was gifted.

Better still, people recognized the kid’s gifts.

His High School for Art and Design teacher, Marshall Davis, tracked down Vega in the hallway, while the student was cutting his printmaking class, and dragged him back.

“He said, ‘Manny, there are a lot of artist who don’t have the spark that you have,’” Vega said. “‘You gotta know that you have it. Technique is technique, but the spark is what we live for. So please, don’t cut my class.’

“That was the first time I think in my life I felt an acknowledgment,” he said.

It happened again when Vega, living a “gypsy lifestyle” among the emerging East Harlem art and music scene in the mid 1970s, came across a white guy, Hank Prussing, standing high on a ladder on 104th St., creating his famous mural called “The Spirit of East Harlem.”

“I yelled up at him that he should let me help him with that,” Vega said. “He came down the ladder and asked me if I knew how to hold a paint brush. I said sure, and next thing I was up the ladder, too.”

Vega, 56, has since created dozens of murals and mosaic murals in public and private spaces throughout the city, most notably at the Pregones Theater in the Bronx, at the 110th St. subway station and on E. 106th St. between Lexington and Third Aves.

The community group originally asked him to paint the mural of Julia De Burgos, the famed Puerto Rican educator and activist, and budgeted about $1,000 for it, Vega said. He instead proposed the now-iconic mosaic mural, and suggested they solicit public donations toward a $20,000 budget.

“I said, ‘Let’s create a campaign and pass the hat around,’” he said. “We came up with the money like that, because the community wanted it.”

Last month an East Harlem group announced that Vega would create a memorial mural for the late Puerto Rican educator and ASPIRA founder Dr. Antonia Pantoja. The final location for Pantoja’s mural is still being determined, but Vega created a limited-edition engraving of Pantoja, which he will sell to raise money toward the estimated $100,000 project.

“What I love about Dr. Antonia was that she considered herself a Puerto Rican New Yorker, and that that configuration is a unique, special one which merits recognition,” Vega said. “This image of Antonia is going to influence a whole new generation of young folks in what it means to be a community activist, to be a person of service.

“That image has to be perpetuated, because it is also a legacy of our humanity.”

A sculptor, painter, illustrator, printmaker, costume and set designer, Vega is also a highly sought instructor who has taught at El Museo del Barrio, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the American Museum of Natural History and the Caribbean Cultural Center.

Influences on Vega’s work are myriad, but none more pronounced than Candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion he has followed since a 1984 visit to a temple in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, and his late wife, Ana Araiz, a latin music promoter who died of brain cancer in 2001. Vega slips a crab, Araiz’s astrological sign, into much of his work in memorial to her.

He created a colorful mosaic mural of her, which keeps watch over his studio work space.

“I was born for this,” said Vega, noting that he doesn’t plan to slow down anytime soon. “Hard work, for me, is what I pray for. Hard work is the biggest blessing in my life, because hard work has presented limits for me to shatter.

“Hard work has made it possible for me to recognize how I have been a contributor,” he added. “Not just be the person in the audience being entertained, but that I can take what comes to me and recycle it.

“It’s important to me that people recognize that. That they can contribute. I always say, did you ask yourself?

“Then how you gonna know?”

crichardson@nydailynews.com

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/uptown/manny-can-do-legendary-painter-plans-newest-mural-article-1.1251626#ixzz2KR3tcmeh

Maoz Vegetarian Comes to Central Park’s Harlem Meer

MANHATTAN — Falafel balls and Belgian fries by way of Amsterdam have arrived in Central Park’s Harlem Meer.

The Dutch chain Maoz Vegetarian opened in a kiosk a few weeks ago at East 106th Street and Fifth Avenue, marking the company’s seventh New York City location.

Maoz Vegetarian opened at the end of May at Central Park’s Harlem Meer. (Facebook/Maoz Vegetarian)

The Parks Department, which has been diversifying Central Park’s food options beyond hot dogs and pretzels toward healthier, and often, more gourmet, offerings, officially welcomed Maoz on Wednesday to its new spot near such cultural institutions as El Museo del Barrio and the Museum of the City of New York.

“The addition of Maoz Vegetarian to the menu of options offered to visitors of Central Park continues to provide those of all tastes a choice meal when experiencing the park,” Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said in a statement.

“Moving beyond classic New York City cart foods, visitors of different tastes can now extend their time at Central Park with a vegetarian choice with some of Maoz Vegetarian’s delicious options such as the falafel sandwich.”

Also on the menu will be Maoz’s popular pita with salad, sweet potato fries, muffins, fresh squeezed juice and mint lemonade.

Maoz signed an 8-year contract for the space, according to the Parks Department, which said the establishment will be open at least through mid-November every year. It will operate seven days a week from 9:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. (subject to seasonal changes and weather related circumstances).

“The public wants a greater variety of food other than hot dogs,” Glenn Kaalund, a project manager in the Parks Department’s Revenue Division, told the Upper East Side’s Community Board 8 at a meeting last year, explaining the agency’s efforts to cater to different palates.

Park-goers can now find anything from Sigmund’s artisanal hand-rolled pretzels in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the upscale Rouge Tomate’s grass fed bison burger or Morroccan chicken sandwich at East 60th Street and Fifth Avenue.

“Tourists love hot dogs,” Kaalund said. “But those of us that are local — not many of us make a stop at a hot dog stand.”

Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20120613/carnegie-hill/maoz-vegetarian-comes-central-parks-harlem-meer#ixzz1xicSekMr

A curator’s mission: Keep art exhibits at East Harlem’s El Museo del Barrio informative and interesting

El Museo del Barrio curator Rocio Aranda-Alvarado strives to put on exhibits that are historic as well as contemporary

Here’s how Rocío Aranda-Alvarado describes her mission as curator at East Harlem’s El Museo del Barrio.

“It requires a lot of intellectual curiosity, and you have to care about how you’re conveying your message to the public,” she said. “You want them to come away with a complete story about something they might not have known about or cared about before.

“You have to make them interested, make them want to learn more and acknowledge the importance of whatever it is they just saw.”

El Museo del Barrio’s massive and varied collection is almost tailor made to that end, she said.

“The museum’s mission comes from the collection, which has pre-Colombian objects in it, Colonial objects in it, modern and contemporary objects as well as objects that fall into popular traditions, handmade objects made by artists who were not trained in a traditional way.

“So we have to pay attention to all those things,” she said. “We have to do shows that are historic as well as shows that are contemporary.

“In a way, the historic shows are more important because they contribute to developing a history of art that is more inclusive,” Aranda-Alvarado said. “It’s not just about what was going on in Europe. It’s about what was happening here also.”

Aranda-Alvarado discovered a love for art when she was a 16-year-old volunteer at the National Gallery in Washington, DC. She worked the Sunday shift with her mother, Elsie Alvarado, riding in together from their Silver Spring, Md. home.

The family had immigrated to the United States from Chile in 1974 and lived on the West Coast and in the Midwest before settling in Maryland.

Volunteering at the National Gallery most often meant giving directions to the nearest bathroom, but what hooked Aranda-Alvarado was the behind the scenes tours of the museum departments.

“I remember once we were about to visit the department of prints and drawings, and we saw a print by the German Renaissance Artist Albrecht Durer,” she said. “To be there, three feet from the unframed print, was an amazing experience.”

(Following tradition, Aranda-Alvarado took her mother’s surname but added her attorney father’s, Patricio Aranda. Her husband, James Congregane, is facilities manager at the Bard Graduate Center.)

Aranda-Alvarado would go on to earn a bachelor’s Degree from the University of Maryland, a master’s from Tulane University, and a Ph.D. from City University of New York, each in a specialized area of art history.

She teaches an introductory art class at CUNY and joined El Museo in 2006 after nine years at the Jersey City Museum.

And she’s glad to be there.

“I love my job, I love my colleagues,” Aranda-Alvarado said. “My favorite part of my job is visiting with an artist in their studio and listening to them talk about what they think, where the ideas come from, why they do the work they do. Because making art is one of the hardest things you can do. Artists follow their paths because its something they love and something they can’t stop themselves from doing. They take our culture and kinda make sense of it.

“East Harlem has a rich art scene, from graffiti, street art and murals throughout the neighborhood to the monthly shows mounted by Taller Boricua at the Julia De Burgos Latino Cultural Center and the well-known artists who still live in the neighborhood, like Diogenes Ballester.

“Artists continue to live here, and new artists come all the time, so there is a vibrant art community,” Aranda-Alvarado said.

As curator Aranda-Alvarado organizes El Museo’s exhibits, which are usually either from the permanent collection, which stay up for about a year, or temporary exhibitions mounted in five of the museum’s galleries, which stay up about six months.

In June, El Museo will join with The Studio Museum in Harlem and The Queens Museum of Art to mount a show that was six years in the making.

That exhibit, “Caribbean, Crossroads of the World,” will feature more than 435 art pieces gathered from Europe, Central and South America, the Caribbean and all across New York and the United States, to explore six broad themes — including tobacco and sugar crops, water, race, and languages — which shaped the history and making of art in the Caribbean.

The exhibit “involved two years of traveling research where curators from the Studio Museum, Queens Museum and El Museo went to different parts of the Caribbean to meet with artists, art museums, art historians, and museum colleagues,” Aranda-Alvarado said.

The show is so huge it will involve three opening nights – El Museo del Barrio, June 12; The Studio Museum on June 14, and Queens Museum of Art on June 17.

“It’s something that has not been done before,” Aranda-Alvarado said. “It’s not like there was a gap in the scholarship, because there are many Caribbean scholars. It’s just that there was kind of a need to bring some people together and bring objects together to tell the story.

“We felt it was a great project to focus on because our mission is Latin American, Caribbean and Puerto Rican art,” she said. “This exhibit dovetails with our mission and it expands our purview into the non-Spanish-speaking Caribbean.”

For more on the museums hosting the Caribbean exhibit, see the websites, www.elmuseo.org; www.studiomuseum.org; and www.queensmuseum.org.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/uptown/a-curator-mission-art-exhibits-east-harlem-el-museo-del-barrio-informative-interesting-article-1.1048138#ixzz1ptnbRnMZ

New York’s Spanish Harlem- A Place of the Past?

Issues like child abuse, domestic violence; sexual abuse, rape, mental illness, and drug and alcohol abuse are real life disasters hardly ever spoken of in polite Latino society. What would the nosey neighbors think? Worse yet what would they say? And when one is Gay in a family, one conceals who one is because of what others will think and if they do respond it most likely be the worst possible condemnation, a horror show of dogmatic religiosity. As Latinos, many of us live in denial, sweet, heavy, exhausting denial in order not to deal with reality that we are less than perfect. What would God say? Worse yet, what would God gossip about us?

Living in lies, half-truths and concealing reality has been a way of dealing. This is a small start for New York Latinos: Spanish Harlem, El Barrio is slowly becoming non-existent. Because of gentrification, the once thriving Manhattan Latino community will one day be no more. Because of artists, politicians and developers, this community is on life support and will one day die and fade away. Even with the housing projects, the poor people there will slowly be moved out and El Barrio will be no more.

Latinos must come to terms and come to grips with the reality that people have moved in and taken over. And very few Latinos have done anything to stop it in the last 15 years.

The gentrification began years ago when El Museo del Barrio, which was first created by Puerto Ricans, became co-opted by wealthy museum mavens who changed the museum’s mission from a community-based organization to a Spanish arts museo. Where were the voices of protests? Where was the real little boy to say the Emperor has no clothes?

Ten years ago in 2001, El Barrio was bustling with Latino life. Events like Julia’s Jam at Julia de Burgos Cultural Center were packed with appreciators of poetry and music. “Siempre” newspaper was the community newspaper to read. A small community shopping mall opened. Summer street festivals teemed with people. Latino life thrived for only a short time during a final crescendo of good feeling before vultures flew overhead signaling that the corpse was ready for devouring. The cancerous consumption commenced. No one now wants to believe that the end is near.  Someday soon El Barrio as one remembers it will be no more, a thing of the past, only living in memories.

The first line of gentrification has always been the artists who come into a low rent community, bringing their art and making life so quaint with bars, coffee shops, galleries, poetry readings and art happenings. The neighborhood soon gets better services in spite of the fact that, after years when Latinos and African Americans lived there, no one noticed or cared. Soon the artists can’t afford to live in a community they helped change.

The community was heralded in the press as being new, up and coming, then landlords raised rents. Developers began building, not for members of the community. No, they’re on their way out but for the more affluent.

Latino Barrio politicians have sold out the community for development, slowly putting herself out of business because when there are no more Latinos who will vote and the politician’s usefulness gone, then it will be time to vote for someone new. The kind of gentrification coming to El Barrio is the same that has come to central Harlem, with large corporate outlets on every corner. Today, no one wants to recognize that the Apaches are being moved from the Reservation – again.

But, Latinos in El Barrio live in a cloud of purple haze. Maybe this is the only way to get through the day – a big, generous spoonful of denial to make reality go down right. Denial might be good for the psyche because to face all of life’s harsh realities square on could be mentally damaging. We might become depressed leading us to feelings of powerlessness then we turn to the bottle, the drugs or worse the needle. In denial, hurt, alone in a hospital we’ll say “the Devil made me do it.” Makes more sense than facing the truth.

Don’t Miss the 34th Annual Three Kings Parade – East Harlem

Thursday, January 6th, 10:30 AM, beginning at East 106th Street and Park Avenue.  The 34th Annual Three Kings Parade (sponsored by El Museo Del Barrio) will walk down the blocks of East Harlem this Thursday so don’t miss out on catching a glimpse of Melchor, Caspar and Balthazar followed by several camels strolling up Third and Lexington Avenue: LINK.

 

El Día de los Reyes is the Christian holiday that celebrates the birth of Jesus in Latin countries and tradition has it that those children who leave their polished shoes under their beds, in preparation for the arrival of the kings of Europe, Arabia and Africa, will receive gifts the next day.  In Puerto Rico, the custom manifest itself as leaving hay in a box under the bed to feed the camels. 

Come early to check out the crowds, costumes and various floats since the route is only for about a dozen blocks and the entire parade runs well under an hours time.

 

Luis Camnitzer At El Museo del Barrio in Harlem

El Museo del Barrio is proud to announce that Luis Camnitzer, a traveling exhibition exploring five decades of work by the conceptual artist and writer Luis Camnitzer organized by Daros Latinamerica, Zurich, will be on view February 2 – May 29, 2011.

Curated by Hans-Michael Herzog, director of Daros Latinamerica, and Katrin Steffen, co-curator, this fascinating retrospective includes approximately 70 pieces dating from 1966 to the present, assembled from the Daros Latinamerica Collection. The exhibition is part of El Museo’s FOCOS series, which highlights mature, under-recognized artists.

“We are grateful for the opportunity to present Camnitzer’s compelling work to our New York audiences, and to collaborate with Daros Latinamerica for the first time in this endeavor so closely allied to our own mission,” states Deborah Cullen, Director of Curatorial Programs at El Museo del Barrio. “Luis Camnitzer is an artist who has been critical to the New York art scene since the 1960s when he moved here, and his influence on the broader Latin American and conceptual field is profound.”

At the heart of his work lies the idea that artists are … ethical beings sifting right from wrong and just from unjust

A pioneer of conceptual art, Camnitzer takes a firm socio-political stance. At the heart of his work lies the idea that artists are not first creators of paintings or sculptures, but rather primarily ethical beings sifting right from wrong and just from unjust. He works in a variety of media—including installation, printmaking, drawing, and photography.

“Camnitzer has developed an essentially autonomous oeuvre, unmistakably distinguished from that of his U.S. colleagues by its exquisite feel for context and contingency, acerbic wit, ludic qualities, ironically metaphorical polyvalence, as well as its solid socio-political commitment,” notes Herzog. “The Daros Latinamerica Collection is proud to enjoy the largest collection of Camnitzer’s work, and is thrilled to share with El Museo’s audience this profound insight into his artistic life.”

A fully illustrated catalogue in English and Spanish published by Hatje Cantz Verlag accompanies the exhibition. In addition to a conversation between Luis Camnitzer and Hans-Michael Herzog, the publication includes essays by Sabeth Buchmann, Antonio Eligio Fernández (Tonel), Michael Glasmeier, Maren Welsch, and Camnitzer, along with a preface by Cullen.

El Museo del Barrio, 212.660.7102, www.elmuseo.org

East Harlem Arts Conservatory Marks Its 40th Anniversary

EAST HARLEM — Nestled in the East Harlem building that is also home to El Museo del Barrio is a sanctuary for music, dance, and theater: The Harbor Conservatory for the Performing Arts, which is marking its 40th anniversary this year.

The non-profit institution has provided instruction in the performing arts to thousands of children from around the city since its creation in 1970. At a time where many extracurricular activities are being cut from city schools, its tuition, which ranges from $5 to $20 per class, helps children 4 to 18 get access to arts education they wouldn’t otherwise have.

“It’s about the cheapest place in town,” said Ramon Rodriguez, who started at the conservatory in 1973 as a music teacher and is now the director.

Rodriguez said the conservatory, which draws funding from a combination of private and public sources, teaches students about the arts, but educates them about much more than that.

“It’s definitely had an impact to help them with their self image, to believe in themselves, to show them there’s other options in life, as far as only being a doctor or lawyer, and giving them exposure to the arts,” he said.

Artistic and dance director Nina Klyvert-Lawson, who studied at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, has seen many success stories in her 22 years at the conservatory.

“It’s done wonders for the lives of the children,” she said. “And when alumna come back around, that’s proof of the pudding.”

“We celebrate each alumna that walks back through that door,” Klyvert-Lawson added. “We celebrate every new child that comes. And we just want it to stand for another 40 years and more.”

Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/20101119/harlem/east-harlem-arts-conservatory-marks-its-40th-anniversary#ixzz15mBf7CIW

Museum of Spanish Harlem

El Museo del Barrio, or the Museum of Spanish Harlem to those of us with less Spanish, is a museum dedicated to this part of town, its inhabitants, and its history. Part of that is the history that happened before there was a Spanish Harlem, when the forebears of the people who brought their culture here were still living in Latin America or the Caribbean.

There’s a focus on Puerto Rican art, but there’s also an extensive collection of pre-Colombian pieces – art and artifacts.

More modern works tend to appear in the gallery as temporary exhibitions, but there are plenty of them. The museum is also involved in many local artistic events, endeavors and entertainments.