LGBTQ+ Puerto Rican history, activism and identity on display at Humboldt Park art gallery

A West Side gallery is showcasing the rich history of Puerto Rican LGBTQ+ identity and activism in Chicago, which can be traced back to the 1960s.

On display through February 2025 at the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture, 3015 W. Division St., is a collection of art pieces in the exhibit “liminal: LGBTQ+ Chicago – Boricua Imaginings.”

The pieces accompany a timeline of important historical events, such as the 1988 opening of Vida/SIDA in Humboldt Park, a medical clinic in the neighborhood that provides culturally and linguistically competent HIV prevention services for marginalized communities and residents.Another milestone celebrated is the 2007 beauty pageant and "Coronation" ceremony, held to honor the trans Puerto Rican community and crown a "Cacique," (a gender-neutral term that comes from the Indigenous Taínos of Puerto Rico) or "chief."

"The show [explores] how to be Puerto Rican, especially a 'diasporican.' Queerness is also on a spectrum," said Anaís Cezanné Caro, the exhibit's curator. . "Everybody has different conceptions about what being LGBTQ+ means to them."

Caro said they want the gallery to "push people to think differently" in a safe place setting, where people can explore and celebrate being Puerto Rican and queer, despite cultural or religious beliefs that don't condone individuals who identify as LGBTQ+.

"All of the pieces are all of the artists thinking about those intersections of their Puerto Rican-ness and their queerness together," she added.

Caro contributed "The Path Most Taken" — footprints painted onto the gallery floor — after the museum's Director of Education and Programming, Veronica Ocasio, encouraged her to create a work for the exhibit.

The idea came to her while she was thinking about LGBTQ+ history, Caro said.

"[History] is never linear. We might think that we've progressed so far," she said. "But then there's always something that takes us two steps back."

Born in Milwaukee, artist José Rosa's piece "Eso No Es De Dios," explores the complexities between identity, religion and queerness.

"I'm really into place-making and sort of creating worlds and alternate realities through a queer lens," Rosa said of their work.

Rosa's work is a multimedia piece featuring an altar with a tambourine, a veil, an offering dish filled with a single rose and cowrie shells, plus screen-printed curtains with ironed-on images.

As a child, Rosa traveled back and forth between the mainland United States and Puerto Rico, where they attended a Pentecostal church. Rosa emphasized the significance of community and spirituality in their life and incorporated those contrasting emotions into their artwork through props and imagery.

One side of their family practiced Santería, a Caribbean tradition that blends Yoruba traditions of West Africa with Catholic beliefs.

"My father and my uncles, they practiced Santería ... I remember seeing altars to Oshun, and I remember going to the parties dedicated to the [saints]," they said.

Also from Milwaukee, Vanessa Viruet is an artist and educator on Chicago's South Side who incorporates identity and fashion in her work. The neighborhood she grew up in was heavily saturated with Latinos, and one thing that was "really big" growing up was witnessing how gang culture shaped the lives of people around her. She studied art in college on the East Coast to escape that life, but eventually made her way back to the Midwest after she realized she needed her community.

"I wanted to start to make work that I could have a conversation with my parents and my grandmother about," she said.

Viruet often works with textiles to create her artwork, but one of the two pieces she contributed to the gallery is a pair of gold hoop earrings called "Boricuir."

"My mom was just always like, 'you're naked if you don't have earrings on,'" she added.

In a fun twist, the earrings are constantly spinning, thanks to a spinner device typically found on low-riders at car meets — which Viruet also grew up around while living in Wisconsin.

Rio Goodwin-Pérez's "Buried Memory" series is also featured in the exhibit. A transgender multidisciplinary artist, Goodwin-Pérez relies on natural materials and recycled objects in their work.

“I was not around a lot of Puerto Ricans growing up,” they said. That led to Goodwin-Pérez exploring Puerto Rican culture on their own through family archives, which also influences their artistic expression.

Like Caro's experience, Goodwin-Pérez said their coming out journey "has not been linear at all."

"I think the coming out story is kind of just like a continuous cycle," they said. "My family has had a really difficult time understanding that just because my identity isn't really cut and dry."

Their relationship with natural materials developed more after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017. They went looking for sea glass and dirt, and incorporated that into archival photographs of their family.

Another of the large pieces featured in the gallery space is "El Tonto," by artist Isabella Mellado, who grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, but decided to stay in the city after getting her Master's degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

A lot of Mellado's work is inspired by tarot cards, and "El Tonto" is inspired by "The Fool," a card (also pinned above the masked being) that traditionally represents new beginnings.

"I'm not often, unfortunately, inhabiting spaces that are Puerto Rican," Mellado said. "I know that that's why I'm so excited to be part of this show ... that speaks to both of my identities in such an honest, gratifying way ... [and] to be surrounded by artists that are also speaking on their experience as Puerto Rican queer people."