Rafael Montañez Ortiz

Raphael Montañez Ortiz (born in Brooklyn, New York in 1934) is an American artist, educator, and founder of El Museo del Barrio, in East Harlem, New York City. He is a graduate of Art and Design High School of New York City, and studied at Pratt Institute, where he began as a student of architecture, decided instead to become a visual artist, and received his BFA and MFA at Pratt Institute in 1964. He continued honing both his artistic skills and his formal education, finishing a doctorate in Fine Arts and Fine Arts in Higher Education at Teachers College of Columbia University. Ortiz's works are in the collection of the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Virginia and the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas.

Ritual, coincidence, duality, transcendence, humanism, performance, gesture, religion and history are only a few of the subjects that the artist has addressed through his works. From the beginning of his career, perhaps his most important concern was avant-garde practice. He worked on the margins of cultural production, creating art from non-art objects, such as domestic items, which he would unmake in a process of (de)construction. While he was interested in avant-garde movements such as Dada and Fluxus, readings in psychology and anthropology influenced him most and acted as the link between his early Archaeological Finds series and his interest in the perceptions of the unconscious mind.¹

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