This exhibition’s populist spirit resonates well at El Museo, one of the least stuffy museums in Manhattan
“I play with the notion of a plural identity. That helps me to move everywhere,” says a participant in Coco Fusco’s single-channel video Els Segadors (The Reapers) (2001). It’s a reflection on the speaker’s transborder identity, but it summarises the mood of this retrospective, Fusco’s first in the US. Included alongside straight-ahead black-and-white portraits of immigrants from the new series Everyone Who Lives Here is a New Yorker (2025), Els Segadors examines diversity in North- eastern Spain amid the revival of Catalan nationalism. Pieces in another gallery revisit Fusco’s legendary collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, the travelling performance The Year of the White Bear and Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–94), created when Fusco was in her early thirties, at a time when identity and the body were becoming central themes in art. Documentary photographs, video, intaglio prints and a walk-in gold cage evoke the performance, intended as a satire of historical exoticisations of non-Western peoples, but which was nevertheless misread by many as reality. The prints, The Undiscovered Amerindians (2005), recall the style of colonial depictions of the so-called New World and Fusco’s memories of the performance: gallerygoers commenting on ‘Amerindian’ grooming habits and skin tone, a man at the Whitney Biennial offering to pay for a picture of him feeding her a banana.
Operation Atropos (2006), a harrowing video showing Fusco with a group of women in another cage experiencing a prisoner-of-war simulation, demonstrates how a state will manufacture truth under duress. “You stop lying, I stop hurting,” a mock-investigator barks at one of the women, whom he has blind folded, before pretending to beat another. Nearby, The Feminine Touch, from Fusco’s book A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008), consists of illustrations based on her research into CIA and United States military exploitation of sexuality to torment Muslim prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and elsewhere.
The final gallery presents a suite of videos, two that verge on the elegiac. In Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (2021), Fusco responds to the COVID-19 pandemic by mourning New York City’s unclaimed dead; drone footage shows Fusco rowing a boat near a mass grave in the Bronx, throwing carnations into the water in tribute. She appears to smile, as if refusing to be paralysed by tragedy or fear. The essayistic La confesión (2015) reconstructs scenes from the biography of the poet Heberto Padilla, who was forced to confess to being a ‘counterrevolutionary’ in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. At the start of her video, Fusco listens to a tape of him reading a text in Spanish and types out an English translation on her computer. Padilla reassures himself that even after the exile or death of a writer, poetry endures. In 2019 Fusco – whose mother fled Cuba when Castro came to power – was barred from entering the country, likely due to her public opposition to Decree 349, a 2018 law that prohibits artists from staging events without prior government permission.
The exhibition’s populist spirit resonates well at El Museo, one of the least stuffy museums in Manhattan. Though much of the work predates Trump’s presidency, it spurns the MAGA right’s increasing demands for a rosy and exclusionary picture of American exceptionalism and its disavowal of painful histories and examinations of institutional racism and sexism. Fusco does not suffer fools gladly and never allows viewers to sit comfortably. After all, this isn’t her first culture war. Stacked in El Museo’s lobby in New York is the third issue of The Siren, a new agit- prop newspaper coedited by Fusco with artists Pablo Helguera and Noah Fischer. The free paper’s tagline, ‘Laughing at the Expense of Tyranny’, points to her longstanding fortitude, ever undeterred.
Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island at El Museo del Barrio, New York, through 11 January
From the November 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
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