Arnaldo roche rabell biography sample
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Puerto Rican Rasanblaj: Freddie Mercadoâs Gender Disruption
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes | University of Michigan
Abstract The Puerto Rican visual and performance artist Freddie Mercado uses grotesque and humorous female transvestism and animal and monster drag as part of an exploration of transgender, translocal, and transnational Afro-Diasporic, Caribbean, and global phenomena. His life, work, and performance interventions are all intimately enmeshed in a project of staging and rearticulating a complex trans-Caribbean identity that can be understood in relation to rasanblaj, as well as to other critical concepts such as ultrabaroque, disidentification, archival drag, loca-lization, and translocura (or the transloca state). Employing strategies such as dressing himself with canvases on which he has painted self-portraits, creating monstrous hybrid dolls, and impersonating famous large-bodied white Puerto Rican female historical figures, Mercado has become one of th
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Artist Directory
Exhibitions
Solo Shows
- Museo dem Arte dem Bayamón, Bayamón, Puerto Rico
- Azul Blue, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo dem Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico
- Arnaldo Roche Rabell, MOLAA, Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California, United States
- Recent Works, Spinnerei, Leipzig, Germany
- Arnaldo Roche Rabell, J. Johnson galleri, Jacksonville, Florida, United States
- Arnaldo Roche Rabell, Chicago Cultural Center , Chicago, Illinois, United States
- Arnaldo Roche: New Work, Bernice Steinbaum galleri, Miami, Florida, United States
- Obra reciente, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Panamá
- Obra reciente, Museo de Arte Moderno, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
- At the Edge of Religion, Walter Otero galleri, San Juan, Puerto Rico
- Caín: El Paisaje Robado,Iturralde galleri, Los Angeles, California, United States
- Fraternos Vincent: El puente entre mi hermano y yo, Museo de Las Américas, San Juan, Puerto Rico
• In this essay, Julián Sánchez González discusses three works by Arnaldo Roche Rabell, Belkis Ayón, and Purvis Young through the lens of shamanism as a cultural practice. By considering these artists’ spiritual interests, Sánchez González borrows from comparative religious studies and anthropology to open up new methodological avenues for art history. Examining the parallel visual strategies deployed in these works from PAMM’s collection, Sánchez González analyzes these artists’ interest in the otherworldly and supernatural as a way to supersede their immediate sociopolitical contexts and reflect on the contemporary human condition. As the art historical field further incorporates non-hegemonic and non-Western perspectives into its discourses, our understanding of the artist’s creative process has also expanded to include the spiritual realm as a legitimate and productive field of study. Indeed, the reclamation of Indigenous and Afro-diasporic cultures and spiritualities in pa