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Professor Alejandro Anreus Curates First Museum Survey of Nuyorican Artist Rodríguez Calero at El Museo del Barrio

Alejandro Anreus, a William Paterson University professor of art and Latin American and Latino studies, is the guest curator of Urban Martyrs and Latter-Day Santos, an exhibition at El Museo del Barrio in New York that marks the first museum survey of the artwork of Nuyorican woman artist Rodríguez Calero.

The exhibition, which runs through December 19, 2015, is the second in a series of five women-artist retrospectives in El Museo’s current five-year plan. According to the exhibition catalog, the focus on Latino women addresses the lack of diversity in contemporary art shows at New York City museums and beyond, and seeks to celebrate the work of brilliantly talented women artists who may not be on the art audience’s radar.

Anreus has championed the work of Rodríguez Calero, who dropped the use of her first name in the face of the sexism she experienced. She fuses popular urban/hip hop cultural figures, Renaissance and religious motifs, and iconography using an original technique called “acrollage,” layering glazes of luminous colors with rice and other kinds of paper. The installation includes 29 large acrollage canvases, 19 smaller collages, 13 fotacrolés (altered photography) on canvas board, and 3 works of mixed media on paper. The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue in English and Spanish that includes an essay by Anreus.

Born in Havana, Cuba, Anreus holds a doctorate in art history from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Before joining the William Paterson faculty, he was a curator at the Montclair Art Museum and the Jersey City Museum, as well as a critic in residence at the Latino Center for Art and Culture, Rutgers University. He is the author of Orozco in Gringoland: The Years in New York, and co-author and editor of The Social and The Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere, and Mexican Muralism. A Critical History. His articles and essays have appeared in Art Journal, Third Text, Encuentro de la cultura Cubana, Commonweal and Art Nexus, and he has authored many exhibition catalogs.