The Practices and Pedagogy of Pepón Osorio

This paper, based on a 2007 interview with Pepón Osorio, seeks to understand the relationship between his work and the pedagogy he has developed as a teacher in the field of community arts. Osorio is an artist whose work is based on community knowledge and a lived connection to families. His work has established the terrain of a particular art that connects the artist, the community and, at times, the museum in a complex system of story telling. In examining Osorio’s work we can identify both his own philosophy and practice as an artist and the way in which these values and strategies have influenced his pedagogy in community arts.

Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, in 1955, Osorio moved to the South Bronx in 1975 and began his early works in 1982. From the beginning of his career his work has been linked to issues of Latino identity and cultural narrative. His work has had a global impact and his 1993 piece, “Scene of a Crime, (whose crime?)” was a pivotal work in the Whitney Biennial. In an Art21 PBS interview, Osorio said of this artwork: “[It’s] as if I had taken a piece of the South Bronx out of its roots and placed it in the middle of Madison Avenue” This displacement or relocation is central to his work. Through its scale and placement in both the community and museum, his art works operate as an “intervention” that links multiple sites and correspondingly brings stories from one community to another.

Pepón Osorio, “Badge of Honor (detail, Son's Bedroom), 1995. Installation view

This cross current of intimate and private images and meanings into a public sphere is a strategy that is revealed in another critical work, “Badge of Honor,” shown first in a storefront of a Newark barrio and then later in the Newark Museum in 1995. The Badge of Honor project involved a father and son separated by prison. The work was inspired by his own concerns as a young father. He began it when his son was two years old, wondering what one does to be a good enough father. This personal issue led him to a larger community issue of incarcerated fathers and their sons. The connection to the father in “Badge of Honor” came when Osorio went to prisons giving lectures and a prisoner came to him and wanted to work with him. The artist began a dialogue piece through visits with both the incarcerated father and his son living at home. In each of these visits he brought video back and forth between the father and son in a virtual call and response. Consequently, through both the dialogue and the installation the viewer listens in on the conversation painstakingly developed by Osorio through multiple visits to the prison and to the boy’s home. By recreating the son’s bedroom and the father’s jail cell, Osorio was able to position the conversation between the father and son through video monitors placed in each room. The side-by-side juxtaposition of the dialogue is set in the baroque layered bedroom of the son, filled with the emblems of popular culture, and the spare and deprived setting of the father’s cell. Ultimately, Osorio helps us to see through the contrast in their material worlds an even greater poignancy in their struggle to retain the bond of familial love.

Where do stories come from?

Beginning in the early 1980s, Osorio’s works have had a consistent foundation in community narrative. His works are grounded in stories linked to his own life experience but residing in the real struggles of community members. He speaks of the narrative impulse that began this artistic process.

It began with my experience as a caseworker in New York City Department of Human Services. It is part of being in a working-class environment, coming out of a working-class environment, understanding that stories have meaning, that objects have meaning, and how everything that is around you is coated with history.[*]

His own experience became the entry point for his connection to others in his South Bronx community where he worked for many years. Actively engaged with others in the neighborhood, he was a keen observer of everyday life and was able to see how the families around him embodied valuable knowledge and meaning in their own experiences.

Personal and Collective

The nature of this exchange and dialogue with community became an underlying structure for his ongoing work in a variety of ways. Initial conversations led to connections to other community members related to the theme of a piece. These were often followed by structured workshops and gatherings, and as the artist developed this model, the personal became the collective. In this way of working relationships, trust and familiarity were key to the successful creation of these pieces.

I am conveying stories about my personal experience based on other people’s stories. It is as though I am channeling community stories or collective experience-it is mine but it also belongs to other people and I can filter it through my creative lens.

 In “El Velorio, The Wake,” presented at Museo del Barrio in 1991,Osorio addressed the profound loss endured in the community by the onslaught of HIV/AIDS. He recreated an actual wake with coffins illuminated with photographic images of many of those who had died in the neighborhood. Based on conversations with the grandmothers whose grandsons had died of AIDS, the artist was able to quote their stories on the rugs and on the walls throughout the installation. In this deep moment of mourning he was able to give back to the community the dignity and respect otherwise unavailable because of the stigma that had affected the families of AIDS victims. This was a seminal piece and reflects his concern for bringing community stories untold and unknown to a visual presentation. It is also an indicator of the limits of mainstream museums. Osorio begins to question whether the museum could embody his vision.

The Museum Is not the Ultimate Space

In the artist’s process, the questions of site became more dominant. His own understanding of the stages of development and where the work begins and where it ends affected his attitude toward the museum. As Osorio began to draw closer to the community process the museum became less tenable, and in the commercial highpoint of the 1980s, the artist began to rethink the museum space. In his work the museum is the place for the object but not the process.

It was later that I became disillusioned with the museum space and that I realized that the museum was a repository of art but not the space for the process. You are trying to undiscipline yourself from what you learned as an artist and undisciplining the work from that place, the museum or gallery. For me the work of art is aging in the museum, but its birth and youth is in the community setting in every home. I think of homes as prime spaces of exhibition. In the early ‘80s it was all about commercial success and it was controlled by a group of people. I always felt excluded from it. Art was much more than all that. I needed to create a model for it. I needed to create a space for my art. If you think that a work of art is more than just a work of art, then the museum might not be the ultimate space.

Home Visits

In later works such as “En la Barberia, No Se Llora (No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop),” commissioned in 1994 by Real Art Ways (RAW) of Hartford, Connecticut, Osorio begins to develop public spaces to create a community site. Osorio chose Park Street, a large Puerto Rican neighborhood, as the site for this installation piece where he focuses on the barbershop as a rite of passage for a young man and invites members of the community to come in for videotaping. Issues of gender, machismo and representation became central to the piece. Inviting both women and men, he creates an ungendered third space, neither the memory of the past, nor an existing community place.

As the artist moves deeper into the life of the community the family home itself is added to the public spaces of storefronts and empty buildings. Here Osorio’s model begins to adapt directly to the space of the home as a space of exhibition and display. In the transition to his new home in Philadelphia, Osorio begins to think about displacement and makes a connection withCongreso de Latinos Unidos, a social-service organization that links him to a young mother who has just lost her home in a fire. The artist works with the mother and her children to recreate a miniature of the home and its contents and the work becomes the basis for “Home Visits.” This work center itself in the loss of home but borrows from the Latino Catholic tradition of moving saints from home to home in a pilgrimage.

When I create work in a community setting or context of ordinary people, I am not thinking so much of art as I am thinking about the essence of the process. Not so much about the object itself but about the process. It is the essence of that very specific moment I wanted to take with me. It is that connection you have with that icon — a connection with the object. That can happen in community when people can interact with the art, contemplate what it means to them without distraction.

Osorio has developed a deep philosophy about the home as a place of contemporary art where the viewer no longer must keep the distance required in museums but, in fact, can be as close as desired to the work of art. His commitment is to the individual and the family and to the possibility that they can live with the art. In his model, the home is the site of art where family can act as collectors, owners and contemplators of art. His own politics of representation has led him to observe that in homes families are already acting as collectors in their own organization of belongings, memorabilia and popular culture objects. From coca bottles to travel mementos, homes are often the site of display and presentation. In the Home Visits model the miniature of Tina’s house traveled from one home to another and the only requirement was that each family had to host a reception for the work of art. The prime space of the house usually included the front room but families were free to determine the area of exhibition. In creating this project, Osorio began to see thehome as the optimal place for the connection to community to happen.

Deciphering Practice, Making Pedagogy

In looking at the model of art making as both a process and an object, we can begin to see how Osorio has created a link between his own practice and the pedagogy of his work in the academy. The following section begins to identify some of this pedagogy and brings to light the situations and resolutions in the teaching setting that makes this work so valuable. The artist has been involved in education from the 1980s forward both as a community educator at the Museo del Barrio and with various projects associated with program in higher education through residencies and commissions. In the last four years he has taken a teaching position at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in the area of arts education with an emphasis on community arts. In this position he has been able to develop his own curriculum and pedagogy involving students directly in the community. He situates the learning experience in the community by having class in a local restaurant where students can observe and learn about the community members. As part of his own practice, Osorio had to learn about a new community as a longtime South Bronx resident relocated to Philadelphia.

Being in a new neighborhood, I had to gain entry to a new community before I could bring the students in. It changed the dynamic of how I worked and how I taught. In the community there is a permission that is granted, kind of like ceremonies in traditional cultures.

There is an ordaining by a group of people. I had to find the people. I had to convince them that this would be a good process. I had to commit to a long-term relationship. Likewise, the students commit two to three semesters. They can shift from family to family within a conclave of residents we work with. However, they must work with a single family for a semester before they could begin to develop the work of art.

The artist had to raise critical questions about art and its meaning for himself, what he refers to as a deciphering. He describes an understanding of your own way of working — a purposefulness, language, beliefs and philosophy that leads you to your pedagogy.

You have to be able to decipher your work before you can teach. Having a dialogue with my process and artwork was important. I wanted to bring in my own process as a model. I wanted them to know where I was coming from with my work.

Intimacy, Relationship and Commitment

In the course of this interview, I learned more details about the artists’ process than I had ever learned informally as a colleague. Osorio referred to these steps of relationship building as the secrets of his process and they are powerful revelations in respect to what he expects from his students and how he supports them in developing the relationships that ultimately guide the art-making process and object for them.

There aren’t really a series of steps. It is very complicated. In some ways I am revealing my secrets. By confessing the secrets of my process, the students can create their own secrets. In the community I look at people and sometimes I spot families that I find very intriguing and have some sort of connection. Then I make myself visually available all the time. In a way we are courting, then when it is the right moment and right time I propose a project and they either go for it or not. If they do, they become part of the network. When making art in the community you cannot hide, like in the studio. There is no way out. I have to articulate the process — students have to rethink the ethical issues, the relationship with the family. It is totally new place for them, a place of resistance.

This model relies on intimacy and familiarity and calls for the artist or student to be in the place of community. In some ways, this model does not work if you are not in community. It is not an intervention of an outsider but the relationship of respect to gain a place inside with a commitment of time and relationship. Through this process, Osorio often refers to the work of art as an intermediary between the artist and the family in which the artist is changed as much as the family. It is a model that calls into question the purpose of art and the role of the artist as a member of or peer in the community.

The student project requires each student to develop a relationship with a single family and from this connection the work of art comes into being. In pursuing what kind of questions are asked or what steps ensue between the students that Osorio is supervising and their families, he reveals a very organic and sensitive matching of students and families. He describes the encounter when meeting with families:

We don’t talk about art. We converse about other things. My life, theirs and whatever else they want to talk about. Something happens during the exchange and sooner or later you find out about what they really want. At the end, the work of art becomes a metaphor for what they longed to say. What it means to them. I do have a set of questions that the families always ask me. What is expected of me? What will happen? How do we choose what stories to tell and represent when there are so many? I access the connection between family and student and I supervise. I try to assess what is the potential connection between student and family.

For example, I connected a family with a student. The family were Puerto Rican immigrants and the student was of Italian immigrant descent. In the conversation the student realized that she and the family had undergone a similar traumatic family loss in the same period of time and she shared this with them. As we visited the TV was on, we paused to watch TV, and then the father talked about going to work in the tobacco field in the same town in which student was born. The father talked about how he felt uncomfortable in the town. She found she shared his experience as an immigrant.

The student learned that for each piece of information you gain you must share yourself personally. There is always a dual center of power in the relationship.

In talking about the development of the project, Osorio reflected on how the conversation, observation and setting help the student create not only the concept but the form as well. He remarked on a student who was struggling to decide what medium could tell the story for her family.

She wanted to translate from a conversation about a horse and she noticed the linoleum floor in the house. She decided to do a whole piece on the floor in linoleum. The idea connects to the availability of the materials that already exist in the family space.

Time and Teaching

One of the most insightful aspects of the model Osorio has developed is his observation on time and community relationships. He describes the flexibility needed to create a sensitive, familiar and meaningful connection. Along with the informal setting, the artist also engages students in community, neighborhood and family events.

You don’t know what you are in for. You go into teaching with specific ideas, but really you don’t know. You have no idea where this will take you. You can’t control the situation. We went to a party for one of our families and it was supposed to begin at 7 p.m. The party did not start until 10 p.m. Even though it was a surprise party.

You have to find out if time matters in making art. There are multiple time zones even within the community. You have to let go of time, you can’t respond to conventional time.

Post Research

One of the most unique aspects of the model that Osorio has developed is the area of post-research. This creates a sustainability factor and allows the student to be accountable to the piece after it reaches its destination and to understand the impact the work has on the life of the family. One such project included a very upsetting event on the day of the family reception for the work of art. A member of the extended family had been drinking and an argument took place, and the students left embarrassed that they somehow had witnessed this family upset.

That student and family member witnessed a private moment that changed the student and brought her closer to the family. Now the father wants to write a play about this family moment and its history. You can see and understand — this is something genuinely connected to the process of making art in the community setting. This happens right there. You see how this person channels his anger and relationship with his brother through art. A shift occurred and we enter a completely new dynamic of boundaries, power, attitudes. It’s like starting from scratch.

The student is having a different relationship with that family. The student is becoming the teacher and the father is becoming the student and I am supervising her. He is asking her to help get the play produced.

Power and Art

In the process of the post-research one of the most significant changes for the students is the realization that once the family has the work of art they also have the power. The student then begins a new process of learning.

 As we stay longer with the family, we see that we have made contributions in their lives. And they have made a change in our lives. It is not about the object, it is the process that is the essence. The family is empowered by the work and the process. The real question is are you ready for this shift in power? It is like passing on the baton to them. It is a different and new relationship.

Conclusion

Osorio teaches his students to shift the process of art making from the object at the end to a real moment of experience that will have a much greater impact on them. They are connected to the process. He is really asking,

How can you create a work of art and think only of the object in a situation where the object is not the main focus. The work acquires a new meaning through the process of art making. When you are at a place where the object is not the ultimate center. This is a radical proposition.

In many ways, Osorio’s approach is a new definition of community art and brings us deeper into the space of community. This model raises profound questions about how we teach art. Where we teach art. When we teach art. These are deeper practices that can only be taught when we are willing to challenge our view of the art object, of the museum, of the process of making art. Osorio draws us into a place of teaching in which there must be risk and trust and hope for a reciprocal practice that brings community into our lives and brings our lives into community.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art. The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.

Amalia Mesa-Bains, Ph.D., is director of the Department of Visual and Public Art at California State University Monterey Bay. She is an independent artist and cultural critic. As an author of scholarly articles and a nationally known lecturer on Latino art, she has contributed to the understanding of multiculturalism and the major cultural and demographic shifts in the United States. In 1992, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. Mesa-Bains served as a member of the Editorial Review Board of the 2008 Community Convening and Research Project, and as editor of its publication, Community Arts Perspectives.

[*] Note: Unless otherwise indicated, all Osorio quotes are from a 2007 interview with Osorio by the author.

Original CAN/API publication: October 2008