Mexico in New York. The photo exhibit “Mexico/Staten Island: Irma Bohórquez-Geisler” on view at the Mexican Consulate in New York
The Consulate General of Mexico and the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York present an exhibition of 35 silver gelatin prints of the Mexican immigrant community taken by Irma Bohórquez-Geisler since 2001. The exhibit is curated by Professor Edward J. Sullivan, it opened on October 28th and will run through February 2017.
Affectionate portraits of members of Staten Island’s Mexican community, a fast-growing population on the borough’s North Shore, are on view at the Mexican Consulate in New York.
The photographs show day-to-day life at home, at work, at church, among family, at cultural events and in community activities. “We the viewers are afforded the possibility to participate, if only at a distance, in a rally for immigration reform, to attend a quinceñera (a girl’s fifteenth birthday party), a wedding or a tamal-making session in a family kitchen” says Edward J. Sullivan, curator of this exhibition and Helen Gould Sheppard Professor of the History of Art, New York University.
Bohórquez-Geisler has stated: “Living in Staten Island has given me the opportunity to record moments of [my neighbors’] daily life and their celebrations that would otherwise remain largely invisible to the broader community and quite possibly lost to history”. With this exhibition we are able to closely observe this history and appreciate its beauty and richness.
The artist considers her work to be documentary social photography. It focuses on an ongoing cultural group associated with real-life situations that capture a moments of reality and conveys what is happening in the Mexican community in New York today.
Bohórquez-Geisler is a multifaceted artist whose photographs capture the uniqueness and universality of an immigrant group that is an active part of New York’s social fabric. She is an artist-scientist who holds a PhD in ecological entomology from Oxford and a BS from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
She began her photographic career in 1999, after arriving in New York in 1991. Her expertise in the field of documentary photography has developed as she has been photographing the Mexican community. She has taken several courses at the International Center of Photography in New York, has exhibited at galleries, community spaces and museums in New York and the metropolitan area. Her photographs have been published and belong to private and public collections.
The exhibit is part of the renowned Celebrate Mexico Festival. Since its inception thirteen years ago, the festival has been highlighting the Mexican cultural landscape in its rich and different iterations. At the same time it has strengthened and expanded the artistic and cultural bridge between the United States and México. From October 24 to October 30, the festival returned with a wide range of events in several venues throughout the city.
