The editorial categories are research topics that have guided researchers during the recovery phase and continue to be the impetus behind the Documents Project’s digital archive and the Critical Documents book series. Developed by the project’s Editorial Board, each of the teams analyzed this framework and adapted it to their local contexts in developing their research objectives and work plans during the Recovery Phase. Learn more on the Editorial Framework page.
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In this short essay, Marcos Dimas discusses his participation in a 1969 group show of Puerto Rican artists at the Brooklyn Museum, where he displayed two paintings, and his first assemblage. He notes that he met the future cofounders of the Puerto Rican artist collective, Taller Boricua, namely, Adrian Garcia, Armando Soto, and Martin Rubio, at the Brooklyn Museum exhibition. Dimas additionally recalls meeting the founder of El Museo del Barrio in 1970, artist Rafael Montañez Ortiz, and becoming an involved activist in the artist collective, known as the Art Workers’ Coalition. Dimas states that during this time, he founded Taller Boricua, and began to abandon his formal art school training in favor of working without any preconceptions. He notes that he began integrating Taíno iconography into his art during the early 1970s, and continues to draw on pre-Columbian sources in his present work.
Marcos Dimas is one of the cofounders of Taller Boricua, the oldest Puerto Rican artist collective in East Harlem (El Barrio), New York City. The essay is a draft of the artist statement that appears in an exhibition catalogue on Dimas’s work, entitled The Voyager organized by El Museo del Barrio that was held from November 6, 1981 to February 5, 1982. This was Dimas’s only major retrospective to date.