There are still two weeks left – until October 15 – to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. But the work of Puerto Rican Taína Caragol, the museum’s first curator of Latino art and history since 2013, has long led to the exhibition of portraits of Hispanic figures who have helped shape U.S. history.
“Our current exhibitions show the many contributions of Cuban Americans, Chicanos, Tejanos, Mexicans, Dominican Americans, Puerto Ricans and Nuyoricans and their impact on a wide variety of fields from music, to the visual arts, literature, labor unions, sports and politics,” Caragol says in a press release from the gallery’s website.
Caragol is also the curator of paintings and sculptures at the gallery, that is part of the Smithsonian complex of museums.
According to the National Portrait Gallery’s website, Taína Caragol’s job has added 170 portraits of Latinx and Latin Amerincans to the museum’s collection.
The exhibitions Taína Caragol curates, the web explains, reflect her academic background in Latin American and Latinx arts, as well as her interest “as her interest in recovering under-documented or invisible histories”.
“Latinxs are not a monolithic group. We are a group made up of different cultures and with different experiences of the United States, some of them dating back centuries,” Caragol told Univision Noticias journalist Lorena Arroyo.
“Latinx and Latin American people have helped shape the history and culture of this country in crucial ways,” Caragol added at the gallery’s official press release.
As Lorena Arroyo reports, in exhibitions that can also be seen in Hispanic Heritage Month, there are portraits – photographs, paintings – of Cuban sonera Celia Cruz, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, Mexican journalist María Hinojosa, Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros, Puerto Rican cultural manager Marta Moreno, Chicanos historian Rodolfo Acuña and Louie Perez, founder of the musical group Los Lobos, Dominican baseball players Alex Rodríguez and Pedro Martínez, and the first governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Muñoz Marín.
The authors of these portraits are also diverse: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (Latino List series), Alexis Rodríguez Duarte, Magda Pach, Harry Gamboa Jr, Freddy Rodríguez, Susan Miller-Havens and Francisco Rodón.
Before going to the National Portrait Gallery, Taína Caragol was the curator of education at the Museo de Arte de Ponce, in Puerto Rico. She was also the Latin American bibliographer for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
At the National Portrait Gallery she was the lead curator of the exhibitions “Portraiture Now: Staging the Self,” with works by contemporary Hispanic artists that reflected “the forces that shape identity” and “One Life: Dolores Huerta,” dedicated exclusively to the unionist. She was also one of the curators of “The Face of Battle: Americans at War, 9/11 to Now” and “UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar.” Caragol is curating an exhibition for 2023: “1898: The American Imperium.
During these remaining two weeks, bilingual activities dedicated to Hispanic Heritage Month at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. will continue. Not only exhibitions will take place, but also talks, performances, workshops and an exhibition in both languages about Dolores Huerta at the Haggin Museum in Stockton, California, “Dolores Huerta: Revolution in the Fields.”