Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Art History

Advisor

Anna Indych-López

Committee Members

Siona Wilson

Rachel Kousser

Kristie Soares

Subject Categories

American Art and Architecture | Contemporary Art | Latina/o Studies | Modern Art and Architecture | Performance Studies

Keywords

Performance Art, New York Art Worlds, Nuyorican Art, Destruction in Art, Raphael Montañez Ortiz, Latinx/o/a Art

Abstract

In the 1960s, Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz built a successful and provocative career in New York. Throughout the decade, Ortiz created sculptures, performances, and events that were part of a sustained investigation into how embodied destructive and uncomfortable actions could physically confront rationality and objectivity. His works attend to how rationality and objectivity were valued in the United States as a consequence of colonization and imperialism. Beginning in 1969, Ortiz overtly addressed how museums are directly implicated in systems of oppression, protesting with the Art Workers Coalition and founding El Museo to meet the needs of the Puerto Rican community that large institutions continued to neglect. Scholars have failed to account for the theoretical and methodological links between Ortiz’s destructive art practice and his leadership within the Puerto Rican art community. This dissertation unifies Ortiz’s confrontational avant-garde art practices as realized within the predominately white spaces of New York’s downtown art scene with his efforts as a director and founder of a museum for Puerto Ricans in New York. I argue that between 1966 and 1971, Ortiz experimented with altering perception, ephemerality, abjection, and visual confusion as tools for destabilizing Western artistic conventions grounded in the visually discernable and collectible fine art object. Ortiz’s anti-colonial framework for challenging object-based art is unique within the history of art in the 1960s, where artists predominately confronted the art object within capitalist critiques.

Chapter one outlines Ortiz’s shift from making and circulating destroyed sculptures titled Archaeological Finds to performative destruction at the 1966 London Destruction in Art Symposium. I contend that for Ortiz, the sounds and sensations of 1960s performance constituted new tools for disrupting the object-based field of art and its roots in Western colonization. Chapter two examines Ortiz’s activities at Judson Memorial Church between 1967 and 1968. I assert that Ortiz revised the existing performative, ephemeral, multisensory, environmental, and participatory elements of Happenings as an opportunity to further interrogate the colonial and racial implications for distinguishing between spectatorship and participation. The third and final chapter details the immersive multimedia installation Boricua: Aquí y Allá Ortiz curated at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in 1971. With Boricua: Aquí y Allá, Ortiz expanded his investigations in multisensory and physically disorienting experiences from his earlier vanguard works to conceive of an installation that would be an emotionally and physically engaging entrance into Puerto Rican life. I foreground Ortiz as a Puerto Rican artist and as a major contributor to our understanding of nonobject, performative, participatory, immersive, and identity-based art.

Download

This work is embargoed and will be available for download on Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Share

COinS