Raphael Montañez Ortiz (born in Brooklyn, New York January 30, 1934) is an American artist, educator, and founder of El Museo del Barrio, in East Harlem, New York City.
Education
Montañez Ortiz graduated from Art and Design High School of New York City, and studied at Pratt Institute, where he began as a student of architecture, but later decided instead to become a visual artist, and received his BFA and MFA in 1964. He completed a doctorate in Fine Arts and Fine Arts in Higher Education at Teachers College of Columbia University in 1982.
Artistic career
Montañez 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, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. and the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. Ritual, coincidence, duality, transcendence, humanism, performance, gesture, religion and history are some of the subjects that Ortiz has rendered through his works. From early in his career, his artistic practice has reflected an avant-garde element. 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 deconstruction. 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.
Montañez Ortiz incorporated indigenous elements to the process of deconstruction, underscoring his awareness of indigenous cultural practice and its possibilities as a model for contemporary aesthetics. In the creation of his earliest film works from the late 1950s, he hacks a film into pieces while chanting. Placing the pieces into a medicine bag, he then arbitrarily removed each piece and spliced them together in a completely random fashion. In his film work from the early 1980s, the artist used an Apple computer hooked up to a laser disc player. He scratched the laser disc, creating a stammering image, and a disconnection between time and space.
Montañez Ortiz has achieved the highest professorial rank at Rutgers University, where he has been on the faculty since 1972. He has been teaching at Mason Gross School of the Arts since its inception.
El Museo del Barrio
During the late 1960s in East Harlem and Central Harlem, a group of African-American and Puerto Rican parents, educators and community activists urged the district that they provide their children an education that addressed their diverse and cultural heritages. Due to these demands, William W. Frey, the superintendent of school district 4, appointed artist/educator Rafael Montañez Ortíz to create materials for schools in East and Central Harlem that would highlight Puerto Rican art, history, folklore and culture. However, he quickly steered the program towards the creation of a community museum that he named El Museo del Barrio: "The Museo del Barrio is its title: a neighborhood museum of Puerto Rican culture. . ." The word barrio," meaning neighborhood in Spanish, was what Puerto Ricans called East Harlem. In its founding documents, Montañez Ortiz stated that "The cultural disenfranchisement I experience as a Puerto Rican has prompted me to seek a practical alternative to the orthodox museum, which fails to meet my needs for an authentic ethnic experience. To afford me and others the opportunity to establish living connections with our own culture, I founded El Museo del Barrio." He served as director of the institution from when it was founded, June 1969, to Spring 1971.