BORIMIX Returns in November for Puerto Rican Heritage Month, Celebrating Latinx Resilience, Creativity, and Intersectionality

2022 Festival honors guest country Venezuela and its intersection with Puerto Rican identity, artistic cultural heritage, and common plight of forced migration.

The Lower East Side has the longest, most diverse, and richest puppet history in New York City; a place where the traditions of manifold cultures mix with each other, and then are spread beyond our city’s boundaries.

Little Amal is invited to party in the Clemente Soto Vélez Center on September 28th, 4-5pm.

To her surprise she meets puppets friends created by Teatro SEA. Together they celebrate the traditions and cultures of this special place!

New York City’s favorite itinerant salsa street event, SALSA STORIES collaborates with new media artists to create light installations and augmented reality experiences.

Contributed by Sharon Butler / To understand Elisabeth Condon‘s paintings, it seems important to know that she grew up in California in a highly decorated house where she spent hours staring at the wild patterns of the fabrics and wallpapers.

The sudden passing of master plenero, percussionist, educator, and community leader Héctor René “Tito” Matos Otero left a void in Puerto Rican communities around the globe. Tito lived his life plenamente—every day he practiced, fought for, and rejoiced in plena, an Afro-Puerto Rican musical expression of drums that shares songs of collective community voice. His life’s work reimagined the landscape of plena both on and off the island during a forty-year career that included stops at the Festival and sessions recorded for Smithsonian Folkways.

The art studio of Miguel Trelles at The Clemente in the Lower East Side of Manhattan is as tidy as it is a tightly packed treasure trove of eye-popping Chino Latino landscapes, Mesoamerican pictural fantasies, figurative portraits of Nuyorican writers Piri Thomas, Pedro Pietri, and Miguel Piñero, silk screens of las divas Maria Félix, Sonia Braga, and La Lupe, a queer twist on an iconic poster of Che, and countless sketches revealing an early love of sci fi and superhero comic books.

Beloff’s recent work has been engaged with the connections between the period of her mother’s childhood and our present. Early in 2017, Beloff began a monumental project, Parade of the Old New, which served as a living document of the United States during the four years of the Trump administration. Painted on large 40 x 60-inch sheets of corrugated cardboard, each tableau provides a scene from our most recent past, from the Trump inauguration ceremony to the day Joe Biden was sworn into office. Taken together, Parade of the Old New is over 130 feet in length, providing running commentary on the unrest that has marked the last four years.

A vision came into focus when we found statistics on the plight of the elderly during the pandemic, how social distancing had accelerated their physical and mental decline as well as their mortality rates. Addressing this problem with creative and holistic tools fascinated me as a teacher and program consultant whose work has focused on vulnerable communities such as the undocumented, LGBTQI youth of color, and elders of color.

As New York City emerges slowly from the pandemic, as worries of gun violence in our city rise, we need to talk about a radical reimagining of NYC — one that respects the dignity and humanity of every New Yorker in every neighborhood.

Based on a 1939 poem by Bertolt Brecht (Parade des alten Neuen), filmmaker and artist Zoe Beloff has reimagined the work as Parade of the Old New in the form of a panoramic large-scale mural, drawn and painted over the past four years onto large sheets of cardboard panels that depict an allegory of the United States “body politic” turning animalistic after the presidential elections of 2016.