OSORIO: It's hard to explain to people what I'm trying to do as an artist,
because I do not fit the artist description.
I'm always doing everything so subvertive.
Like always differently.
My work deals a lot with contradiction.
I embrace contradiction.
Contradiction can coexist with beauty—it can coexist with anger.
It can coexist with the different emotions. The human body.
[ latin music ]
In "No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop," it's about recreating my memory.
When I was five years old, my father took me to get my first haircut,
right around the neighborhood.
What was meant to be a celebration, became a disastrous event.
This barber, he was not used to dealing with kinky hair, curly hair.
I was crying a lot, I was scared. I was traumatized by the sound of the hair clipping.
There was a combination of race, a right of passage into becoming a little man,
and I think that they both came together simultaneously.
"No crying allowed in the barbershop" deals with the issue of machismo,
but as a whole.
And as a whole, it connects to the universe, somehow.
The piece pays homage to my father, a man of African descent.
I often feel that as people of African descent,
we were completely displaced from the community that we come from,
which is, which is a contradiction, but it makes sense in Puerto Rican reality.
MAN: when he was about eight or nine years old,
I noticed that he painted the ceiling of the house, of his room.
It was beautiful, you know, it looked beautiful, so later on I got happy.
LUISA: He always—everything, he wanted always to, to—
he was doing all kinds of articles like, like houses, trucks, cars and everything, he would.
And we enjoyed seeing him working, because I want him to make,
at least to have a trade.
Coming from a working-class family, being an artist is not an option,
it's more of a challenge than anything else.
I just cannot remember ever saying, "I'm going to be an artist."
It was not a possibility, It was not an alternative.
I was working as a social worker, and I put that role in my pocket.
I always had to have two things happening simultaneously,
just in case one didn't go good, well then I had the other one to survive.
The only way that I can connect Is by doing installation work,
because I feel that I needed to say something that had to be beyond something on the wall.
I need to create a space that is overpowering.
I'm very much aware that my work, it's one that provides,
aesthetically, an uncomfortable reaction in many people.
It's interesting, because a lot of the people ask me, "Do you live like this?"
"Is this how your home is?" And it isn't—I am making a very calculated intervention.
When this piece, "The Scene of a Crime," was at the Whitney Museum,
it almost felt as if I had taken a piece of the South Bronx
and placed it in the middle of Madison Avenue.
The Latino community has been portrayed as one that is very accessible.
And in, specifically "The Scene of a Crime,"
it has a yellow ribbon where people are not allowed to come in—
because I have delineated these very specific spaces
and very specific issues as sacred spaces.
And as you stand and you're not allowed to come in, then you need to reflect.
And you need to confront yourself—
almost as if I stand a giant mirror right in front of you.
Every time I create a work of art, and I go into different, other sectors of society,
to gather information, and the work is created when I bring together where I am
and where the rest of society is.
MAN: okay, I just want to know if this, do we have to keep on visiting you behind bars,
or are we going to live like a family already, 'cause you in jail and us two out here,
you know mom is probably, ain't barely making it, you know what I'm saying?
MAN: I used to get up in the middle of the night to change your pampers, to…
You pissed on me a couple of times, you used to cry and,
and I remember all of that.
I remember the first words that came out of your mouth was "daddy."
I didn't pass this year, 'cause it was one death after the other,
and then you getting locked up.
And it was just like everything, you know, just falling on me.
OSORIO: What I would love people to come out is thinking who they are
in relationship to what they have just seen, and start a negotiation.
Not only with the artwork, but the public at large.
Who I am. Where do I stand?
MAN: I love you now, son.
OSORIO: I'm very much aware that what I wanted to do is to provoke change,
not only socially, but physically and spiritually.
MAN: You've done public art projects in barbershops,in taxi cabs, in basketball courts.
Is this the first time you do a project within a domestic setting?
OSORIO: No, I've worked in Santa Barbara.
It was called "state of preservation."
And it was about plastic.
I went with the whole issue of the stereotypical imagery of Latino family using plastic.
And I went into this very open-minded family, a very wealthy family,
and we plastified the whole house.
[ laughter ] And they lived like that for about three months.
Every single precious object was plastified.
And it was incredible—they were really open-minded people.
"Home Visits," it's loosely rooted in religious, popular tradition of the visiting saint.
When I was a kid, we were visited by a niche of a virgin of Guadalupe, sent by the church.
And I thought, what about the same thing with contemporary art?
WOMAN: It almost looks like there's flame in there.
OSORIO: Why can't contemporary art visit one home after the other for the week?
The idea of the new century, it's about… a renewal, for me.
I wanted to go back and renew all this—
my mission, my philosophy, my way of looking at art—
and I know there's something missing that I wanted to find or create again.
Who's that in the front?
GIRL: That's the...
[ laughter ]
GIRL: Telling a story.
OSORIO: Telling the story of how it happened.
The story's based on Tina and her two daughters.
Tina lost her house and all her possessions, due to a fire.
Shortly after it happened, she put a little blanket over the girl.
And, you know, so there's a lot of stories inside that the family told me.
I was intrigued by the idea that I've gained so much, yet the possibility of losing it overnight.
So, moving right along, I've got to take it to another place, another opening.
I'm going to miss the house, 'cause it's been here for a week
and it's going to feel funny having this space opened.
Since childhood, I have felt that somehow there is one piece missing.
When I got to New York, I spoke English, but it wasn't good enough.
So then I just felt that somehow I couldn't understand completely what was going on,
but I got a picture of it.
But it wasn't so good that it didn't get the real picture of it.
And sometimes I feel that I'm eternally, you know, displaced, that I'm there,
but I'm not quite there.
But I think that, as an artist, I've been able to resolve one thing—to find my own place.
I have a very clear mission. I know exactly what I wanted to do with my work,
and how my displacement somehow seems perfectly fine for the people out there.
Because there are many of us in the same boat as I am.