EMILIO SANCHEZ: From The Bronx Museum Permanent Collection

Emilio Sanchez features thirteen paintings from The Bronx Museum of the Art’s permanent collection by renowned Cuban-American artist Emilio Sanchez (1921–1999). Born in Camagüey, Cuba, in 1921, Emilio Sanchez was schooled in the United States and maintained a studio in Manhattan from the late 1950s until his death in 1999. Considered by many scholars a master of late American modernism, Sanchez began his art training at the Art Students League, New York, in 1944. Throughout his career he created a great number of drawings, prints, and paintings, documenting the landscape, street scenes, and vernacular architecture in places he visited around the world.

The paintings and watercolors in this exhibition are based on industrial and commercial buildings around the Mott Haven and Hunts Point neighborhoods in the South Bronx. To produce these works, Sanchez visited the area on several occasions in 1988 to photograph buildings and street scenes. In his studio, he later abstracted the visual information captured in the photographs giving emphasis to the bright colors and commercial signage characteristic of the neighborhood. Many of the sites chosen by Sanchez are still recognizable today, although some structures have changed purpose over time, while others remain unchanged.

Also on view is a documentary video by Laura Napier that revisits some of the sites Sanchez portrayed, this time filling in the emptiness and neatness of the paintings with people, architectural details, movement and sound.