Wilson Valentín-Escobar, PhD (he/him/él) is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Public Humanities at the Schools of Public Engagement. He is a scholar, professor, curator, and activist who hails from pre-gentrified Brooklyn. His scholarship, teaching and curatorial work live 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 Fellowship, Valentín will complete his book manuscript, Bodega Surrealism: Latine Artivists in New York City (NYU Press) in which he examines the artivism of Puerto Rican and Latine first and second generation, working-class, avant-garde artists.  The pioneering artivists who Valentín 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 said stereotypical notions but decidedly pushed multiple conventional boundaries.

This generation chose not to be erased and celebrated their inherited complex socio-political cultural histories. These Latine artists embodied multiple identities and did not find these to be competing or contradictory. They were radical, vanguard, Bohemians who proudly contributed to the Loisaida zeitgeist of experimentation with an edge, while choosing to lift and push towards the center their marginalized realities.  NRV was pioneered by a cadre of visionary artivists whose relationship to the U.S. stemmed from colonialism, extractive capitalism, institutional racism, generational poverty, and the trauma that resulted from neoliberal organized abandonment.

Valentín’s research examines various pivotal and prescient cultural performances, art installations, arts programming, archival documents, and conducted over two dozen oral history interviews through which he demonstrates how NRV artivists’ socio-aesthetic practices cultivated decolonial dreams and brought about bold social, spatial, political, and aesthetic interventions. NRV served as a living laboratory for an intersectional exploration of the aesthetic and the artistic, where visual culture, music, poetry, dance, theater, and photography all shaped, informed, and advanced not only the artists’ collective imaginaries, but opened new pathways of possibilities for younger generations. As key members of what eventually became the Nuyorican arts movement, these artists emerged as a Latine Cultural Left who believed and operated on the premise that art can create emancipatory social change, both for the individual and the collective, calling forth what Valentín identifies through this culturally specific vanguard movement as Bodega Surrealism.