Nuyorican Baroque: Pepón Osorio's Chucherías

Abstract

Pepón Osorio's knick-knack-encrusted objects and installations represent a visually potent engagement with Puerto Rican popular culture on the mainland and, more specifically, are the products of the artist's own experiences living and working in the barrios of New York City. Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, Osorio moved to New York in 1975 at the age of twenty. For the past fifteen years, he has been creating artwork marked by his signature style, a visual overload of tchotchkas, plastic toys, Puerto Rican flags, tourist and religious kitsch items, and products “made in Korea.” His adoption of this kitsch aesthetic has prompted one critic to call his work “plastic heaven”1 and one curator to title his 1991 retrospective at El Museo del Barrio in New York, “con to' los hierros”—a Puerto Rican expression loosely translated as “giving it all you've got.” Disrupting normative distinctions of taste and high art, Osorio uses kitsch to engage with the complicated formation of lower- and middle-class Puerto Rican identity and to forge a self-conscious strategy of cultural resistance.