Founded in 1993 by a group of Latinx artists and cultural workers, the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center in the Lower East Side has for three decades been a bastion of Latinx arts and culture. At the Clemente, located in a historic neo-Gothic building dating to 1897, visuals arts in the galleries butt against a robust cohort of various theater groups, alongside several artist studios.
Last fall, the Clemente launched a three-year initiative called “Historias.” With a significant grant from the Rauschenberg Foundation, the citywide initiative will see the Clemente partner with various cultural organizations, like Performance Space New York, to create a series of programs, events, and exhibitions through oral histories and alternative forms of storytelling and research that aim to tell a fuller picture of New York City by centering the contributions of Latinx people to this history. “Historias, meaning both histories and stories, is more than just a celebration—it is an urgent political intervention,” the Clemente declares on its dedicated website for the initiative, which will serve as a repository for its programming, which runs through fall 2026.
In April, the “Historias” initiative will organize three events. An exhibition, “Historietas: Latinx Comix as Alternative Histories,” running April 6 to May 31 in the Clemente’s fourth floor gallery, that looks at the history of Latinx comic books. On April 16, Performance Space New York will host “Remesas y Sobremesa: Tequio (Mutual Aid) in an Era of Deportation and Borders,” an event over a shared meal that will involve conversations about “mutual aid as a vital response to anti-immigrant policies and how to provide immediate and long-term relief to fractured communities” that will be led by artist and anthropologist Cynthia Santos-Briones, academic Michel Castañeda, journalist Paola Ramos, and photographer Natalia Mendez. From April 25 to May 25, the Bronx Art Space will have on view an exhibition titled “¡Te Amo Porque S.O.S. Pueblo!” featuring 38 artists who have “personally lived the realities of the U.S. borderland industrial complex” and whose names have been kept anonymous for their safety, according to the website.
To learn more about “Historias,” ARTnews spoke with Libertad Guerra, the Clemente’s executive director and chief curator.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for concision and clarity.
Scenes from the block party that launched the “Historias” series, outside the Clemente.
ARTnews: How did the “Historias” initiative come to be, and how do you see it fitting into the Clemente’s mission and history?
Libertad Guerra: The Clemente is one of the quintessential New York downtown organizations that New Yorkers feel is a vital part of the city’s cultural vibrancy. Basically, it catalyzes the creation of new work from independent artists and producers and cultural workers, so you’d feel it if it wasn’t there. But obviously, it’s under the radar. The organization is now more than 30 years old, and I joined in 2020, right before the pandemic. But I myself have previously been a beneficiary of the place, when I was wearing multiple hats as a producer, curator, etc. So I know the void that it fills. It’s housed in a city-owned building from the turn of the century, designed by Charles B.J. Snyder, when he was the superintendent of school buildings back when schools were considered palaces for the people, and the architecture really reflects that. Over time, it was abandoned and then went through different phases, but in the early ’90s, cultural activists, mostly in theater, made it into a cultural center for Latinos with a mission that it would serve everybody. As a true downtown organization, artists ended up getting studios there.
The Clemente has since become this hybrid ecosystem where it houses one of the biggest residency programs in the city—long-term ones, rotating ones, and micro residencies—which we’ve recently added more of. It benefits more and more artists. It also houses an ecosystem of 13 to 14 small arts organizations, mostly Latino-centered. It has four theaters. It has two galleries. And we, as an organization, conduct our own original programming, which is where “Historias” fits in as a codification of our programmatic design. We are also very much involved in cultural advocacy for Latinos. At the beginning of 2020, we cofounded the LxNY consortium, which has now grown to about 45 Latinx-focused arts organizations in New York City to explore resource sharing, collaboration, strategy, policy strategies. “Historias” is the first initiative that is focused on producing and collaborating on programs at a city-wide level as opposed to more behind the scenes policy and strategic thinking. It’s led by the Clemente but the structure of it is to harness the assets of this network.
Scenes from the block party that launched the “Historias” series, outside the Clemente.
Did you come to the Clemente with the “Historias” initiative in mind or did it come out organically once you’d already started?
“Historias” came out organically, but it stems from what the Clemente is. It’s such an active space all the time that it’s really difficult for people to pinpoint just one thing that it is because it’s so many things to so many people. The visual arts community, the theatrical community, the heritage preservation folks, festivals, the people that the independent resident artists bring to their studios are all there. Because it’s so many things to so many people that it’s difficult to cohere into just one identity. Rather than filtering that or simplifying it, what we’re trying to do is streamline all those identities into “Historias.” Our main mission is to be a cultural center that is for Latinos, by Latinos, but it’s also much more than that because we’re in the Lower East Side and downtown Manhattan and that belongs to everyone. And anyway, our definition of the city is one of relationality, not one of static identities. So “Historias” became an idea that I was nurturing, and finally we got funding for it from the Rauschenberg Foundation. The aim is to cohere everything that the Clemente is doing by default, with like collaboration and partnerships, but also to put us more squarely in line with public humanities initiatives of research and of providing platforms that stay after the events, which includes a digital platform that acts as the repository of everything that we’re seeding. That repository includes the stories [from the community] that we’re rescuing through our scholarly and institutional advisors into a timeline and mapping project. We aim to create something that is both for researchers as well as lay publics to go deeper, if they want to.
At the same time, we are kind of hacking the system. Organizations of color are always underfunded. We do a lot with a little. We have a budget of less than $2 million a year. What is our secret? It’s the constant collaboration and partnership that happens, and how we harness that to scale beyond our resources. It’s also very experimental in format in that way. That’s where the LxNY network comes in: how do we use that as a field? It’s not an either/or. It’s about how we elevate everybody and how we supplement each other to create a bigger impact. To me, that’s a narrative impact, which is super essential. I also wanted us to explore that correlation between fact-based histories and the role that artists and cultural producers can play in translating fact-based stories to see how we can re-historicize what New York City is because Latinos make up almost one-third of New York’s population. We are the largest immigrant group taken together. But the ways that we are credited in terms of shaping the city itself is very tokenized or just simply not mentioned. That’s also part of the aim, as well as what is the role of the cultural field in in preserving or rescuing that, or giving it visibility?
Scenes from the block party that launched the “Historias” series, outside the Clemente.
Can you talk more about the stories you’re trying to collect and recover?
The easiest way to understand it is that latinidad is an evolving thing. It’s not static, especially in New York City. We see the city as having multiple positionalities that are relational. So we decided to anchor our storytelling under six themes, which we call thematic tracks: urban ecology, migration and spiritual belief, embodied heritage, everyday poetics, material culture and memory, and labor and commerce. “Historias” is also divided into three phases over the course of the three-year initiative. Right now, we’re in the first phase, “Historias Sembradas” (Sown Histories), in which we’re thinking in public, seeding connections with not only different partners and institutions, both within the network that I mentioned but also external and external institutions, as well as doing commissions with artists. All of them will elucidate an aspect of the thematic tracks. That’s the macro level of structure for “Historias.”
Libertad Guerra.
Courtesy Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center in the Lower East
Then we also have a signature series of programs. We wanted to change the typical approach. The main questions were, how do we reclaim narratives in a city that has often left us out of the official story, and then, how do we root ourselves in those spaces of belonging while navigating a city that is constantly in flux? That’s part of the essence of the city, so we don’t want to go against that dynamism, but at the same time, how do we find that anchor, that space. I thought it was needed to reimagine the conventional art talk or panel format by centering living archives, which I would say come through play, through performance, through ritual, through relationality. Then we focus further in on what I consider tables of connection. There are two programs that revolve around different prototypes of tables of connection. One is what we’re calling “Remesas y Sobremesa.” It’s a play on the idea of remittances, those connections that go beyond borders, that go to the motherlands, and how living in New York City itself, as Juan Flores would say, is a diaspora city. There’s not a static identity; it’s constantly back and forth. “Remesa” is something that a lot of cultures do, Latinos included, of taking a topic further in the coziness and the nourishing ambience of a meal, so it’s all very embodied. It’s also very ritual infused. We’ll have six of these, one per thematic track.
The first one, in December at Performance Space New York, was for the labor and commerce track, looking at labor, economies, and collective power. There was an installation with a bodega-inspired aesthetic and food, and the invited speakers represented the Street Vendor Project, the Worker’s Justice Project, and the United Bodegas of America. It was amazing to find those connections between labor and culture, and how it all fits in the cultural landscape of our cultural institutions for us. We have to see this as part of our own approach to cultural production and representation for the art world. What do the delivery workers’ rights have to do with cultural institutions of color? Well, a lot actually, because that’s the identity of a lot of our neighborhoods and what we claim to preserve and represent, and also how it could play a role in solidarities, solution building, and even policy thinking across the board. Everything was done as the panelists, moderators, and the public at large were all embedded together while eating. It was very relational, not this top-down formatting.
Interestingly enough, an example of someone who bridged those two was our namesake, Clemente Soto Vélez. He was a Puerto Rican political prisoner who was exiled to New York City, and he was an avant-garde poet. He mentored so many cultural workers and artists. And even though he was a communist, he founded the Puerto Rican Merchants Association in the mid-century. That’s an example of a cultural worker and artist knowing that these things are not separated, and that culture is embedded in your environment, and that it’s also part of how you claim your right to the city.
Stills from Domino Table Talks, a video series produced by Sandenwolff Productions, 2025.
Courtesy Public Art Fund and The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center
And what is the second prototype you wanted to experiment with for the “Historias” initiative?
The other prototype that we wanted to explore is through play, which is also a ritual. Those are the Domino Table Talks. The domino table is a symbol to so many, but certainly the Caribbean and Latin American community. It’s about relating it to public space. Dominoes are a stage of embodied knowledge, connection, and storytelling, but it also reveals a lot about cultural hybridity. Through these conversations, you see how it doesn’t just belong to anyone. We’re not trying to say this is just a Latino thing. No, on the contrary, this is like a short circuit for you to claim your presence in whatever neighborhood, on the sidewalk, and how you actually transform your own identity and pass traditions onto other people. What we what we decided to do was to superimpose a game on top of the game. So, there’s the domino table, and the symbolism that comes with it. But we also wanted it to reflect on wherever the domino game is taking place. The launch last fall was with the Public Art Fund and the sculpture the organization commissioned by Edra Soto is in Central Park.
We were also inspired by those celebrity poker games from like the ’90s. We wanted to do something similar by curating who the players are, from different backgrounds, ages, expertise, mostly cultural workers and artists, for them to reflect with certain prompts that we would give them. While they’re playing, they have these prompts that they organically bring up in their conversations, but everything was done through the lens of domino playing. One example was about transnational identity and how the game of domino symbolizes that. The intergenerational knowledge that you’re providing other people, the cultural syncretism that happens when you are comparing different modes of domino playing, from, for example, Cubans to Venezuelans to African Americans, and the embodied knowledge which comes through that ritual, and those archives that are ingrained in us. Another was about taking up space or reclaiming space— the fact that you’re taking up space in a sidewalk and how it is no longer just a mode of transit. This is how you reassert yourself, your presence, in your neighborhood, perhaps it’s one that is being gentrified. So this becomes an act of resistance against gentrification. We aim to have at least 10 to 12 episodes to complete the series for the Domino Table Talks.
Stills from Domino Table Talks, a video series produced by Sandenwolff Productions, 2025.
Courtesy Public Art Fund and The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center
Playing dominos as a mode to have these intergenerational conversations is such an interesting approach. That to me seems like one of the ways—cooking can be another—in which elders can be vulnerable and pass on knowledge.
That’s the embodied knowledge. That’s what we mean when we say the living archive because the stories are the ones that are often not in the official archive. It’s a practice where you have to use part of your brain to do something that is almost ritualistic. Most creativity comes when you’re doing something that doesn’t take up so much of your brain power, but that you know how to do it kind of in automative way—that’s where you’re more creative. That element of play and ritual liberates you to another zone of your brain to then make those connections. It puts you in the zone of sharing, of building trust, of building mutuality. If that’s happening in the intimacy with your family, imagine what happens when it happens through diasporic communities that are strangers to a new place, and they’re doing it in public. That political statement means: we’re going to be here, we’re going to be visible. We’re going to put ourselves in a vulnerable space and, at the same time, open ourselves up to build trust and to build new communities—what I call “accidental communities,” that are not just the static community of your ethnic origin in the city. This goes against top-down city planning models.
How else will “Historias” develop over the coming two-plus years?
As all of this is happening while the Clemente, a city-owned building that we are the stewards of, is going through a major capital project renovation to make the building fully ADA-compliant and accessible, as well as investing in renovating the theaters and other spaces. (It’s a more than 120-year-old building, and all this time, it’s never had an elevator.) I’m calling it Clemente 3.0 because during this time we will be a bit quieter, even though we’re not fully close to the public. The Clemente is still open, and it never stops. Sometimes people call it the building that doesn’t sleep. For that reason, a lot of the of the events are not necessarily happening at the Clemente, which is part of the point of the “Historias” project, as a strategy to do research, develop commissions, and seed ideas that can later be revealed once the renovation is complete in 2026. This will all culminate with an exhibition in the new, renovated galleries at the Clemente, as well as some commissions that will be citywide.
