Artistic Decoloniality as Aesthetic Praxis: Making and Transforming Imaginations and Communities in NYC

Wilson Valentín-Escobar, PhD (he/him/él) is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Public Humanities at the Schools of Public Engagement. A scholar, professor, curator, and activist who hails from pre-gentrified Brooklyn, his work lives at the nexus of social justice and varied art-making modalities that aim to showcase the liberatory artistic practices of wrongfully maligned and marginalized groups. As an interdisciplinary scholar trained in the Critical Ethnic Studies tradition, he has long been committed to community engaged pedagogy and collaborative, transdisciplinary, public-facing scholarship that fosters praxis-oriented intellectual inquiry.

During his GIDEST presentation, which is drawn from his current book manuscript, Bodega Surrealism: Latine Artivists in New York City (forthcoming with NYU Press), Wilson examines the artivism of Puerto Rican and Latine first and second generation, working-class, avant-garde artists.  The pioneering artivists he studies engaged in aesthetic interventions and organized alternative spaces in New York City, including the New Rican Village Cultural Arts Center (NRV) in the Lower East Side (Loisaida) neighborhood of Manhattan in 1976. Unconfined by limited material resources, NRV was fashioned as an artistic laboratory for liberatory, decolonial practices to transform social, political and aesthetic arenas. Unabashedly, the community of artists at the NRV not only challenged stereotypical notions but pushed multiple conventional boundaries.