Adal Maldonado
Encyclopedia
Adál is a Puerto Rica
n artist
who forms part of the Nuyorican cultural movement
in New York City
.
, Adal Maldonado relocated to New York City at the age of seventeen. Baptized as Adál by photographer Lisette Model
, he was trained as a photographer and master printer at the San Francisco Art Institute
in the early 1970s. Adál is the co-founder and co-director - with Alex Coleman - of Foto Gallery in SoHo
, New York City, 1975; an experimental gallery solely devoted to photography and photo-derived works as a fine-arts medium.
, Robert Mapplethorpe
, and Lucas Samaras
- and due to his complex view of double identity, Adál has systematically explored identity issues to their ultimate consequences. From suggestive, “surreal” photographic collages in the early 1970s, to the ironic concreteness of his Auto-Portraits series, and, finally, to the creation of an ethereal, ubiquitous country where he and his Out of Focus Nuyoricans colleagues live, Adál has collapsed self-portraiture’s
allegedly self-referential quality. Indeed, a great deal of his work’s satiric trademark arises from the constant mockery of the possibility of ever achieving an ultimate, definitive picture of one’s self.
By exposing the absurdity behind the search for ultimate reference to selfhood in art, Adál challenges the notion of literalness. His relentless punning on literal meanings has become the most privileged artistic principle in his work, and has enabled him to address perhaps the most slippery characteristic of his own biography: his double cultural allegiance as a Nuyorican
. Through this mechanism, he has been able to successfully incorporate the potentially satiric quality of the Spanglish Language Sandwich and bilingual code-switching into his self-portraiture without making it strenuously conceptual and to tackle the scandals of the day with theatrical irony.
Most importantly, though, such exploration of the literal has allowed Adál to go against the grain in terms of self-portraiture by moving from self to type. If in his early series of photographs, like The Evidence of Things Not Seen..., the masterful use of the photo collage creates a disorienting effect that supposedly resembles his most intimate and individual mental landscapes, his new Out of Focus Nuyoricans series is an exercise in collective portraiture that literally takes these Nuyoricans’ “out of focus” cultural and political conditions and turns them into a guiding aesthetic principle. In the last few years, Adál has, once more, taken this principle to its limits by creating an imaginary world, El Spirit Republic of Puerto Rico, where he and his colleagues can live in an out-of- focus world.
Outside this imaginary territory, Adál works in the Passport Agency quietly issuing passports to anyone who wants to be an honorary citizen of El Spirit Republic. Neither demiurge, king, or president of his own imaginary territory, Adál merely works for his own creation like any other bureaucrat – his latest self refashioning. His first series of photographs, The Evidence of Things Not Seen... was published by Da Capo Press
in 1975 and has become a collector’s item. Four more books have followed: Falling Eyelids: A Foto Novela, Foto Graphics Editions, 1980, Portraits of the Puerto Rican Experience I.P.R.U.S. – 1984, Mango Mambo Galeria Luiggi Marrozzinni/Instituto de Cultura Puertoriqueña
, 1987, and most recently, Out of Focus Nuyoricans, published by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University
, 2004.
, with whom he started a long and fruitful collaboration that lasted until Pietri’s death. Together they developed El Puerto Rican Embassy Project (1994) and Mondo Mambo: A Mambo Rap Sodi - a collaboration with musician Tito Puente
and choreographer Eddie Torres
, presented at the Public Theater
, NYC, in 1990. Adal has also collaborated with Ntozake Shange
, creating the Photographic Environmental Design of the play Love Space Demands, 1992 and with Robert Mapplethorpe
, in the early 1970s, developing his distinct photographic printing style.
. Act I was performed on their stage and the complete three and one half version was presented at the Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture, NYC, 2006.
Adál is currently working on a novelized version of La Mambopera: a book entitled, Mambo Madness.
, NYC, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
, NYC, the Museo del Barrio, NYC, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
, and Musée de la Photographie a Charleroi, Belgium, Lehigh University Art Galleries
. A retrospective of his work was exhibited in 2004-2005 at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts
.
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.Puerto Rico comprises an...
n artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
who forms part of the Nuyorican cultural movement
Nuyorican Movement
The Nuyorican Movement is a cultural and intellectual movement involving poets, writers, musicians and artists who are Puerto Rican or of Puerto Rican descent, who live in or near New York City, and either call themselves or are known as Nuyoricans...
in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
.
Life and education
Born in Utuado, Puerto RicoUtuado, Puerto Rico
Utuado is a municipality of Puerto Rico located in the central-western mountainous region of the island known as La Cordillera Central. It is located north of Adjuntas and Ponce; south of Hatillo and Arecibo; east of Lares; and west of Ciales and Jayuya. In land area it is the third-largest...
, Adal Maldonado relocated to New York City at the age of seventeen. Baptized as Adál by photographer Lisette Model
Lisette Model
Lisette Model was an Austrian-born American photographer.Lisette Model was born Elise Felic Amelie Stern in Vienna, Austria...
, he was trained as a photographer and master printer at the San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute is a school of higher education in contemporary art with the main campus in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, California. Its graduate center is in the Dogpatch neighborhood. The private, non-profit institution is accredited by WASC and is a member of the...
in the early 1970s. Adál is the co-founder and co-director - with Alex Coleman - of Foto Gallery in SoHo
SoHo
SoHo is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City, notable for being the location of many artists' lofts and art galleries, and also, more recently, for the wide variety of stores and shops ranging from trendy boutiques to outlets of upscale national and international chain stores...
, New York City, 1975; an experimental gallery solely devoted to photography and photo-derived works as a fine-arts medium.
Photography
As have many other photographers of his generation - most notably Cindy ShermanCindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman is an American photographer and film director, best known for her conceptual portraits. Sherman currently lives and works in New York City. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. She is represented by Sprüth Magers Berlin London in and Metro Pictures gallery in...
, Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and nude men...
, and Lucas Samaras
Lucas Samaras
Lucas Samaras , is an artist, born in Kastoria, Greece. He studied at Rutgers University on a scholarship, where he met Allan Kaprow and George Segal. While at Rutgers, he joined Gamma Sigma . He participated in Kaprow's "Happenings," and posed for Segal's plaster sculptures...
- and due to his complex view of double identity, Adál has systematically explored identity issues to their ultimate consequences. From suggestive, “surreal” photographic collages in the early 1970s, to the ironic concreteness of his Auto-Portraits series, and, finally, to the creation of an ethereal, ubiquitous country where he and his Out of Focus Nuyoricans colleagues live, Adál has collapsed self-portraiture’s
Self-portrait
A self-portrait is a representation of an artist, drawn, painted, photographed, or sculpted by the artist. Although self-portraits have been made by artists since the earliest times, it is not until the Early Renaissance in the mid 15th century that artists can be frequently identified depicting...
allegedly self-referential quality. Indeed, a great deal of his work’s satiric trademark arises from the constant mockery of the possibility of ever achieving an ultimate, definitive picture of one’s self.
By exposing the absurdity behind the search for ultimate reference to selfhood in art, Adál challenges the notion of literalness. His relentless punning on literal meanings has become the most privileged artistic principle in his work, and has enabled him to address perhaps the most slippery characteristic of his own biography: his double cultural allegiance as a Nuyorican
Nuyorican
Nuyorican is a portmanteau of the terms "New York" and "Puerto Rican" and refers to the members or culture of the Puerto Rican diaspora located in or around New York State especially the New York City metropolitan area, or of their descendants...
. Through this mechanism, he has been able to successfully incorporate the potentially satiric quality of the Spanglish Language Sandwich and bilingual code-switching into his self-portraiture without making it strenuously conceptual and to tackle the scandals of the day with theatrical irony.
Most importantly, though, such exploration of the literal has allowed Adál to go against the grain in terms of self-portraiture by moving from self to type. If in his early series of photographs, like The Evidence of Things Not Seen..., the masterful use of the photo collage creates a disorienting effect that supposedly resembles his most intimate and individual mental landscapes, his new Out of Focus Nuyoricans series is an exercise in collective portraiture that literally takes these Nuyoricans’ “out of focus” cultural and political conditions and turns them into a guiding aesthetic principle. In the last few years, Adál has, once more, taken this principle to its limits by creating an imaginary world, El Spirit Republic of Puerto Rico, where he and his colleagues can live in an out-of- focus world.
Outside this imaginary territory, Adál works in the Passport Agency quietly issuing passports to anyone who wants to be an honorary citizen of El Spirit Republic. Neither demiurge, king, or president of his own imaginary territory, Adál merely works for his own creation like any other bureaucrat – his latest self refashioning. His first series of photographs, The Evidence of Things Not Seen... was published by Da Capo Press
Da Capo Press
Da Capo Press, is an American publishing company with headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1964 as a publisher of music books, as a division of Plenum Publishers. it had additional offices in offices in New York City, Philadelphia and Emeryville, California...
in 1975 and has become a collector’s item. Four more books have followed: Falling Eyelids: A Foto Novela, Foto Graphics Editions, 1980, Portraits of the Puerto Rican Experience I.P.R.U.S. – 1984, Mango Mambo Galeria Luiggi Marrozzinni/Instituto de Cultura Puertoriqueña
Institute of Puerto Rican Culture
The Institute of Puerto Rican Culture , or ICP, for short, is an institution of the Government of Puerto Rico responsible for the establishment of the cultural policies required in order to study, preserve, promote, enrich, and diffuse the cultural values of Puerto Rico...
, 1987, and most recently, Out of Focus Nuyoricans, published by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, 2004.
Collaborations
Adál is also known for his collaborations with many different artists. In the mid-1970s, Adál met the late Pedro PietriPedro Pietri
Pedro Pietri , was a Nuyorican poet and playwright who co-founded the Nuyorican Poets Café. He was the poet laureate of the Nuyorican Movement.-Early years :...
, with whom he started a long and fruitful collaboration that lasted until Pietri’s death. Together they developed El Puerto Rican Embassy Project (1994) and Mondo Mambo: A Mambo Rap Sodi - a collaboration with musician Tito Puente
Tito Puente
Tito Puente, , born Ernesto Antonio Puente, was a Latin jazz and Salsa musician. The son of native Puerto Ricans Ernest and Ercilia Puente, of Spanish Harlem in New York City, Puente is often credited as "El Rey de los Timbales" and "The King of Latin Music"...
and choreographer Eddie Torres
Eddie Torres
Eddie Torres is a salsa dance instructor. He has trained thousands of dancers, including some of the most well known contemporary dancers such as Frankie Martinez and Seaon Brystol. Through his dance school, he has taught thousands of people how to dance salsa in his own distinctive style...
, presented at the Public Theater
Public Theater
The Public Theater is a New York City arts organization founded as The Shakespeare Workshop in 1954 by Joseph Papp, with the intention of showcasing the works of up-and-coming playwrights and performers. It is headquartered at 425 Lafayette Street in the former Astor Library in the East Village...
, NYC, in 1990. Adal has also collaborated with Ntozake Shange
Ntozake Shange
Ntozake Shange born October 18, 1948, is an American playwright, and poet. As a self proclaimed black feminist, much of the content of her work addresses issues relating to race and feminism....
, creating the Photographic Environmental Design of the play Love Space Demands, 1992 and with Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe
Robert Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and nude men...
, in the early 1970s, developing his distinct photographic printing style.
Theater
Adál wrote a musical entitled "La Mambopera" - www.mambopera.com - during a playwright residency at the Tribecca Performing Arts Center, New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. Act I was performed on their stage and the complete three and one half version was presented at the Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture, NYC, 2006.
Adál is currently working on a novelized version of La Mambopera: a book entitled, Mambo Madness.
Exhibits and recognition
Adál’s has been exhibited and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern ArtMuseum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, NYC, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...
, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
, NYC, the Museo del Barrio, NYC, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art dedicated to the arts of the 20th/21st centuries. It is located at 11 Avenue du Président Wilson in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.-Description:...
, and Musée de la Photographie a Charleroi, Belgium, Lehigh University Art Galleries
Lehigh University
Lehigh University is a private, co-educational university located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in the Lehigh Valley region of the United States. It was established in 1865 by Asa Packer as a four-year technical school, but has grown to include studies in a wide variety of disciplines...
. A retrospective of his work was exhibited in 2004-2005 at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
.
External links
- "The Spaciness of Adal." Fallon and Rosof's ArtBlog.