Nuyorican & Diasporican Visual Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Arlene Dávila and Yasmin Ramirez, 2025, Duke University Press
“Graffiti is art and if art is a crime, please God, forgive me.”
So wrote Lee Quiñones on his monumental New York subway car works of graffiti in a poetic mea culpa that served as both tag and mischievous statement of defiance.
Quiñones is recognised as probably the most accomplished graffiti artist to have emerged from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a visionary foundational figure in the history of NYC graffiti.
Yet, as art historian Arlene Dávila points out in Nuyorican & Diasporican Visual Art, one must carefully navigate through scholarly and exhibition literature that makes reference to Quiñones to discover his Puerto Rican background, if it is mentioned at all.
Moreover, while widely recognised as a master who has gained international recognition, Quiñones has exhibited just once in Puerto Rico itself, and has cherished a lifelong dream of being shown there in Ponce, the city of his birth.
This artist embodies the condition of Puerto Rican diaspora art in the United States—an invisible genius that, if recognised at all, is rarely done so with a national or cultural acknowledgment.
In many ways he also embodies the condition of Puerto Rico itself—a neglected US colony whose status and national identity have been so comprehensively blurred by design over a century that any challenge to the imperial claim upon it is, by definition, likely to fail.
Nuyorican & Diasporican Visual Art is the second book in recent months to be published alluding to the “erasure” of Latin America in the annals of art history that are dominated by scholarship in the US, the first being Kency Cornejo’s Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America, reviewed here.
As editors Arlene Dávila and Yasmin Ramirez point out, their book seeks “to address sedimented erasures in academia, art history, archives, and museums through interdisciplinary examinations of the evolution and impact of Puerto Rican visual culture in the United States”.
A pattern is clearly emerging here, and it is not unreasonable to suggest from the outset that the US academy, gallerists, collectors and the curatorial establishment have a major problem—and that problem is called Latinx art. It is probably also called Native American art, African-American art, Asian-American art etc. although that is beyond our remit here.
Nuyorican & Diasporican Visual Art documents and seeks to archive the diverse and vibrant work of a wide range of artists producing graffiti and street art alongside printmaking, sculpture, realism and abstraction from New York to Minneapolis, Orlando and Philadelphia.
This collection undertakes a critical evaluation and presents an historical overview of the Puerto Rican community’s visual art production in an effort to assert its importance alongside the vanguardist movements that emerged in New York from the 1960s onwards.
If not comprehensive, its contributors explore a wide range of media and output that give an excellent overview of the scale, diversity and dynamism of this body of work, with chapters, for example, on the Puerto Rican avant-garde art, the alternative art space movement in New York, Taller Boricua, Máximo Colón’s activist photography, and the collaborations between Puerto Rican/Nuyorican Artists and the workshop of master printmaker Robert Blackburn.
The collection also aims to develop a more intersectional, inclusive understanding of the corpus, emphasising as such undervalued contributions and radical aesthetics of female, black, and queer Puerto Rican artists.
Stitched throughout the analysis is the cultural and racial erasure of Puerto Rican and other diaspora artwork as products of a distinctive yet highly diverse immigrant culture.
With reference to Quiñones, Dávila wites: “Oftentimes, the focus on graffiti as a global medium has involved the recognition of New York City as the cradle of graffiti, but also the simultaneous erasure of the creatives of colour behind this movement … In particular, within the graffiti literature, there is recognition of a distinctive New York style, but individual creatives of colour and the racial dispossession that birthed the medium receive minimal acknowledgment.”
While the book examines art in many media, graffiti art serves well as a metaphor for this blindness—even when eventually embraced by the art market, it was still regarded as vandalism, stripped of its cultural and political significance.
Dávila writes: “To understand why Nuyorican artists’ role in the creation of this global art movement has not received necessary recognition, we must first centre the racism and classism at play in the reception and evaluation of this cultural movement.”
Indeed, this has been the case even within mainstream scholarship of the Nuyorican movement itself more broadly understood—especially poetry and civil activism—in which graffiti artists have often been marginalised. Subsequent recognition is in no small measure the result of the efforts of graffiti artists themselves to demand their due—a phenomenon in which Puerto Ricans played an outsized role.
In 1972, for example, Hugo Martinez founded United Graffiti Artists and began to organise street artists in an effort to legitimise and commercialise their efforts, from the outset attributing the growth of graffiti to a group of “Puerto Rican adolescents”.
This was a pioneering and groundbreaking movement—in September 1973, UGA organised the world’s first ever gallery show of graffiti art at the Razor Gallery in SoHo, with this and subsequent exhibitions quickly gaining mainstream recognition.
Such art was inherently political, Dávila suggests, pointing to the spatial dynamics and struggles that seem to permeate Diasporican art in keeping with Puerto Rico’s own battles over control of a space that is colonised by the US both physically and culturally.
Imperialism is, of course, fundamentally a spatial phenomenon based on dispossession—first, naturally, of the Puerto Rican archipelago itself and, thence, of the claims among the exiles this produces to spatial control within their new home in the metropolis serving industrial capitalism.
Cultural imperialism can be considered an epiphenomenon by which, alongside the ever-decreasing spatial claims of the displaced, the nationalist vector which is the only way it can assert those claims is eroded to the point of disappearance. In this way, imperialism seeks to render invisible anything but the culture that reflects the metropolitan social order of capitalism—what you might term “Western culture”.
Quiñones may typify this, with Dávila arguing that his work often makes statements of reclamation and belonging—he was among the first graffiti artists to paint openly in daylight where everyone could see in an emphatic stance about communities’ inalienable right to public space.
Today, graffiti remains within contemporary Nuyorican art a key indicator of urban culture in New York City and a sign of the Puerto Rican diaspora community’s spatial continuity, resilience and survival.
Another example of this is Danielle De Jesus, whose paintings reflect her activism against gentrification and displacement, often in cahoots with the artist Shellyne Rodriguez, to fashion a “decolonial urban aesthetic that validates and uplifts elements of everyday urban Latinx life that are usually devalued”.
Dávila writes: “As a victim of gentrification from Bushwick, the community she grew up with, De Jesus stamps her paintings with graffiti to mark landscapes and distinguish the communities of Bushwick—archiving and recordkeeping the graffiti that marks these neighbourhoods’ walls, stoops, doors, and commercial metal fences before it succumbs to the area’s rapid gentrification and commercialisation.”
What these and so many more Nuyorican/Diasporican artists share is a perspective that confronts an increasingly aggressive financial speculation in housing and space in contemporary cities.
Their art comprises a demand to be visible, recognised, and valued in a metropolitan space ordered by an imperial culture bent on erasing the singularity of its colonial peoples.
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Categories: Caribbean, North America, Puerto Rico, United States