The Puerto Rican American photographer Sophie Rivera (1938-2021) is best-known for her 1978 Nuyorican Portraits. For the black-and-white series, she photographed Puerto Rican sitters in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighbourhood to uplift the Latinx diaspora in New York City.
Although she engaged with and celebrated Latinx communities, Rivera never wanted her work to be confined to identity politics. In fact, much of her output was highly experimental. Double Exposures, her first career survey, reassesses Rivera’s practice, situating the artist within the broader discourse of post-war photography while foregrounding both her political activism and technical skill.
While Rivera is under-recognised in the canon, Susanna V. Temkin, the show’s curator, says that calling her “unknown” is inaccurate. The artist worked across portraiture, photojournalism and experimental image-making, and exhibited widely during her lifetime. She was actively involved in artist-led movements in New York, and she worked with networks of Latinx and feminist photographers and community organisers.
Temkin attributes the genesis of the show to an enigmatic work Rivera donated to the museum in the late 1980s: the colour photograph Alternators (1975, printed 1986). Rivera captured the image from the inside of a subway car while looking out a window through graffiti. Alternators speaks to Rivera’s “experience as a New Yorker, which she was through and through”, Temkin says, as well as her long relationship with El Museo.
“I hope this show becomes an opening for further studies of Rivera’s work,” Temkin says. “Through both the research process and the exhibition itself, there’s so much more to uncover.” She adds that Rivera’s writing also merits greater attention, “especially the articles she published in the 1970s—where she advocated for the freedom of women artists to exhibit nudes, for example, just as men were able to do.”
- Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures, El Museo del Barrio, until 2 August