A New York Installation Honors 1960s Activists Through a Celebrated Photographer’s Lens

The New York City agency that operates its public healthcare systems has honored a radical activist group that occupied a hospital to demand better healthcare services for underserved communities in the 1960s with a new public art installation.

Artist Miguel Luciano designed the installation (2024) on a new floodwall outside of the Metropolitan Hospital Center in East Harlem, a part of the NYC Health + Hospitals public health system, using historic photographs by his late friend and mentor Hiram Maristany.

Luciano’s new work mostly features joyous moments of life in East Harlem, including Maristany’s photographs like (1965) and (ca. 1970). The art, made from ceramic frit on tempered glass, was funded with the wall by FEMA as a protective measure after severe flooding from Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

“It celebrates the beauty and strength of our community’s history, from children playing in the fire hydrants in the summertime to community members marching with the Young Lords—the beauty of everyday people in moments of joy, play and resistance,” Luciano said in a statement.

Maristany was the official photographer and a founding member of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican activist group inspired by the Black Panthers and once branded as “militant” by . Luciano, who was mentored by Maristany, once heralded him as “the People’s photographer here in El Barrio.”

In 1968, a group of Puerto Rican youth founded the Young Lords as a street gang in Chicago, but it quickly became a rallying group for social activism to support the rights of Puerto Ricans and other marginalized communities after World War II.

A chapter founded in New York by 1969, which launched its first major protest action blocking traffic on 100th Street in Manhattan with garbage to protest the city’s inadequate sanitation services, according to the Museum of the City of New York.

“We thought Sanitation would come take the trash away once we’d bagged it all up for them,” Maristany told in 2019. “We had bags and bags and bags of trash. We said, ‘You going to come clean this trash up now or what?’ They refused.”

Maristany, a lifelong resident of East Harlem who died of cancer in 2002, had been given a camera by a social worker when he was a young teenager. He went on to document each of the Young Lords’ acts of protest in New York, as well as the poverty and congestion of his neighborhood during the diaspora from Puerto Rico after the war.

Among their most radical acts was the occupation of a building owned by Lincoln Hospital in 1970. The group invaded the building in the morning and held it for more than 12 hours while negotiating with hospital officials for better health care rights. The city replaced the aging facilities with a new Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx in 1976.

“Lincoln Hospital is only butcher shop that kills patients and frustrates workers from serving these patients,” Gloria Cruz, health lieutenant for the Young Lords, said at the time. “This is because Lincoln exists under a capitalist system that only looks for profit.”

Later that year, the Young Lords would occupy a church to demand for reforms to the city’s jail system after a man named Julio Roldan was found dead in his cell at the Manhattan House of Detention. Roldan had been arrested and charged with arson for garbage fires set to protest the Department of Sanitation. In its existence, the group also called for better access to tuberculosis screenings, free breakfast for children, and safe reproductive care.

Larissa Trinder, an assistant vice president for the health system’s Arts in Medicine division, noted that the 1970 takeover of Lincoln Hospital is commemorated in a mural titled (2024) by artist Dister Rondon that was unveiled earlier this year at the Bronx hospital.

“Miguel Luciano’s installation reflects the history and resilience of the people of East Harlem, and we are grateful to be the conduit for sharing this work with our community and each person who passes our walls,” said Julian John, the chief executive of Metropolitan Hospital Center. “This installation represents the essence of East Harlem and its history, and we are proud to be a part of it.”

Works by the artists are featured in the collections of major American museums, with Luciano’s art also featured in El Museo del Barrio where Maristany served as director during a crucial period of its development through the 1970s. Both men are currently featured in the exhibition “Shifting Landscapes” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com