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Osorio created El Chandelier for a performance piece that explored the life of a Puerto Rican woman living in New York. The fixture is encrusted with doll babies, bowling pins, palm trees, plastic animals, and sculptures of saints—the cheap, brightly colored decorations called chucherías that appear in "Nuyorican" households.

El Chandelier is dazzling and light-hearted, but the illusion of abundance masks the poverty of the barrio. Osorio acknowledges that most people won't understand the larger message, for he is an outsider himself, raised in a middle-class Puerto Rican family. He saw this kind of rascuache—making something wonderful out of nothing— in the apartments he visited as a social worker. Osorio speaks of his admiration for barrio culture as well as his frustration with its limitations. El Chandelier, with its mixed Spanish and English title, suggests the lives of people who find themselves trapped between two cultures, no longer at home in either one and making a feast for the eye as a compensation.

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006

Keywords

Object - furniture - lamp

Object - toy - doll

decorative arts - furniture

glass

metal

plastic

readymade

About Pepón Osorio

Born: San Juan, Puerto Rico 1955

Online Exhibitions

• Catalog: Pepón Osorio -- 2
• Pepón Osorio, 1995
• Treasures to Go
• A R T E L A T I N O