Works
Among Vega's public art projects are a mosaic mural at the Pregones Theater in the Bronx, a mosaic mural portrait of Julia De Burgos in East Harlem, a series of mosaic panels for the 110 street train station, also in East Harlem, as well as a series of painted murals throughout New York City. [2] [3]
For many years, Vega has been teaching visual arts for organizations such as El Museo del Barrio, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Caribbean Cultural Center. [3] He has exhibited extensively in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Brazil.
Vega has created set designs and costumes for DanceBrazil and The American Place Theater.
Since 1984, Manny has been traveling to Salvador, Bahia in Brazil, where he has been initiated into the Afro Brazilian temple known as "Ile Iya Omi Ase Iya Masse". As a member of the temple, his creative talents have been utilized to create some of the most elaborate ritual costumes and accessories. His work in this medium has been documented by the Fowler Museum of UCLA, the Smithsonian, as well as Dartmouth College. This body of work has been documented in the book, Beads, Body, and Soul: Art and Light in the Yoruba Universe, [4] as well as the book, The Yoruba Artist. [5]
His current focus is to create a series of mosaic projects, based on study of classic Byzantine mosaic fabrication, to adopt this style to modern day imagery, which he calls "Byzantine Hip Hop". [6] Vega has a studio on 103rd Street in East Harlem. [7]
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. It originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s in neighborhoods such as Loisaida, East Harlem, Williamsburg, and the South Bronx as a means to validate Puerto Rican experience in the United States, particularly for poor and working-class people who suffered from marginalization, ostracism, and discrimination.
El Museo del Barrio, often known simply as El Museo, is a museum at 1230 Fifth Avenue in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is located near the northern end of Fifth Avenue's Museum Mile, immediately north of the Museum of the City of New York. Founded in 1969, El Museo specializes in Latin American and Caribbean art, with an emphasis on works from Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican community in New York City. It is the oldest museum of the country dedicated to Latino art.
Zilia Sánchez Dominguez is a Puerto Rico-based Cuban artist from Havana. She started her career as a set designer and an abstract painter for theatre groups in Cuba before the Cuban revolution of 1953-59. Sanchez blurs the lines between sculpture and painting by creating canvases layered with three dimensional protrusions and shapes. Her works are minimal in color, and have erotic overtones.
James De La Vega (1972) is a visual artist of Puerto Rican descent who lives in New York City. He is best known for his street aphorisms and muralist art.
Rafael Tufiño Figueroa was a Puerto Rican painter, printmaker and cultural figure in Puerto Rico, known locally as the "Painter of the People".
CITYarts, Inc. is a nonprofit public arts and education organization, focusing on creating murals and mosaics with youth and professional artists.
Freddy Rodríguez was an American artist born in the Dominican Republic, who lived and worked in New York since 1963. Much of his work takes the form of large hard-edge geometric abstractions. His paintings have been widely exhibited and are held in several important collections.
Candida Alvarez is an American artist and professor, known for her paintings and drawings.
Glendalys Medina's practice focuses on transcending the symbolic systems of language and image by investigating the role they play in forming identity. Medina is currently a professor at SVA’s MFA Fine Arts program and lives and works in New York.
David Antonio Cruz is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing, painting, video, and performance. Cruz is best known for his psychological paintings that combine figuration, abstraction, and collage. His work has been shown in a number of venues, including El Museo del Barrio, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and has been awarded several fellowships. Cruz lives and works in New York City.
Marta Moreno Vega is the founder of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI). She led El Museo del Barrio, is one of the founders of the Association of Hispanic Arts, and founded the Network of Centers of Color and the Roundtable of Institutions of Colors. Vega is also a visual artist and an Afro-Latina activist.
Firelei Báez is a Dominican-born, New York City-based artist known for intricate works on paper and canvas, as well as large scale sculpture. Her art explores the Western canon through the elements of non-Western reading.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an American writer, educator, and artist from East Palo Alto, California. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts known for her work in installations, book arts, immersive text-based installations, large-scale public text pieces, publications, collage, and audio recordings. Rasheed's art explores memory, ritual, discursive regimes, historiography, and archival practices through the use of fragments and historical residue. Based in Brooklyn, NY, she is currently the Arts Editor for SPOOK magazine. In 2021 her work was featured in an Art 21 documentary, "The Edge of Legibility."
Scherezade García is a Dominican-born, American painter, printmaker, and installation artist. She is a co-founder of the Dominican York Proyecto GRÁFICA Collective. García is an Advisor to the Board of Directors of No Longer Empty and sits on the board of directors of the College Art Association (CAA) for the period of 2020–2024. She is assistant professor of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Austin, Texas and is represented by Praxis Art in New York, and Ibis Contemporary Art Gallery in New Orleans.
iliana emilia García is a Dominican-born, American visual artist and sculptor known for large-scale paintings and installations. She is a co-founder of the Dominican York Proyecto GRÁFICA (DYPG) Collective. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is represented by ASR Contemporáneo.
Esperanza Cortés is a Colombian-born American visual artist who lives and works in New York City. Her paintings, sculptures and installations explore the themes of social injustice and cultural invisibility. She draws on the folk traditions of the Americas, including their rituals, music, dance and art.
Laura Anderson Barbata is a contemporary artist. Based in Brooklyn and Mexico City, Barbata's work uses art and performance to encourage social justice by documenting traditions and involving communities in her practice.
Priscila De Carvalho is a Brazilian-born American contemporary artist who is known for paintings, sculptures, murals, site-specific art installations, and permanent public art.
Kenny Rivero is a Dominican-American visual artist who makes paintings, drawings, and sculptures that explore the complexity of identity through narrative images, collage and assemblage, language, and symbolism. Rivero is currently a Lecturer in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art and a Visiting Artist at The Cooper Union.
Guadalupe Maravilla, formerly known as Irvin Morazan, is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer. At the age of eight, Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. In 2016, Maravilla became a U.S. citizen and adopted the name Guadalupe Maravilla in solidarity with his undocumented father, who uses Maravilla as his last name. As an acknowledgment to his past, Maravilla grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts belonging to undocumented communities and the cancer community. Maravilla's studio is located in Brooklyn, New York.
