Few contemporary artists have examined the ethnographic gaze as thoroughly or turned it back on itself as effectively as Coco Fusco. Throughout her three-decade career, she has inhabited multiple roles - museum specimen, interrogator, colonial queen, and subaltern laborer - to expose the systems that create and maintain these positions. Her first United States retrospective, "Tomorrow I Will Become an Island" at El Museo del Barrio, traces this evolving choreography of perception through four thematic sections: Immigration Narratives, Intercultural Misunderstandings, Interrogation Tactics, and Poetry and Power.
Fusco's works, whether filmed, staged, or photographed, consistently return to charged encounters between observer and observed. What began as performances about being looked at has evolved into frameworks for looking back - examining surveillance, museums' display apparatus, cameras' complicity, and viewers' positions within these systems. The exhibition demonstrates how her art has transformed from critiquing the act of being observed to creating new ways of observing power structures themselves.
In "Els Segadors" (2023), part of the Immigration Narratives section, a diverse group of Catalans recites their centuries-old independence anthem, which was banned during Francisco Franco's mid-20th-century dictatorship and later revived as a sovereignty symbol. Filmed in a single, frontal frame and intercut with candid exchanges between Fusco and participants, the work allows the performance to gradually unravel. Pride gives way to hesitation, patriotism to unease, until discussions of belonging turn to acknowledgments of exclusion.
The video's formal elements mirror its thematic complexity. Voices slip between Catalan and Spanish, color alternates with grayscale, and the anthem mutates through salsa, folk, and rap styles. Each shift introduces a hybridity that unsettles fixed notions of Catalan identity, while each slippage loosens the seams of the nationalist script it supposedly restages. This gradual breaking open of scripted performance applies to much of Fusco's work across different media.
Rounding out the same gallery is "Everyone Who Lives Here Is a New Yorker" (2025), a continuous band of black and white portraits depicting immigrants, friends, and strangers posed against urban and domestic backdrops. Taken over the past year during a period shadowed by immigration raids, the work initially appears as informal yet intimate portraiture. However, when viewers cross the room to encounter Augustus Frederick Sherman and Lewis Hine's early-20th-century immigrant photographs hung in a grid, it becomes clear that Fusco has staged her subjects to mirror the archival compositions.
The contemporary portraits create deliberate echoes of historical images. A Venezuelan family in Queens sits in neat alignment echoing Sherman's "English Family at Ellis Island" (undated), while beaming subjects in "Ecuadorian child vendors holding bouquets" reanimate Hine's "Child Vendors, Bowery, 1910," their smiles lending warmth to an iconic image once used to spur child labor legislation. Notably, while Fusco's photographs explicitly cite immigrant portraiture, they position people not by their arrival conditions but by the particular ways they belong to New York.
This studied quality defines much of the retrospective. Fusco's performances often borrow from institutional procedures, recreating military drills in "A Room of One's Own: Women and Power in the New America" (2006-08) and enrolling in immersive military interrogation simulations in "Operation Atropos" (2006). These works dissect the grammar of disciplinary systems by inhabiting their forms and exposing their underlying mechanisms.
Her videos carry the same investigative and elegiac impulse. Works such as "La confesión" and "La Plaza vacía" (both 2012) consider Cuban national memory by splicing found footage, oral histories, historical documents, partial testimonies, and Fusco's measured voice-over to trace the Cuban revolution's afterlives. Watching hours of accumulated testimony and archival fragments feels like joining her in the act of sifting through historical debris.
Fusco speaks with a reporter's cadence - methodical, informed, occasionally weary. Her editing reveals an equally strong pull toward metaphor: long takes of the deserted Plaza de la Revolución, watched over by monumental steel portraits of Castro and Che Guevara, alternate with archival footage of military spectacle. The vacant square and its flattened icons mirror the revolution's own hollowed-out ideals.
The Cultural Encounter section features a room revisiting Fusco's earliest and most overt institutional critique. "Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit The West" (1992-94), created with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, is represented through photo documentation and a reconstruction of the original cage. The work satirizes enclosures once used to display Indigenous peoples at world's fairs and museums, a practice that continued well into the 20th century, as a wall timeline makes clear.
The artists, dressed in hand-sewn grass skirts, leather wristbands, and red face paint or masks, posed as undiscovered natives, staging an ethnographic fantasy of discovery and display. The cage's mix of props - a Kahlúa Tiki decanter on a European-capitals tablecloth beside a Mickey Mouse rug and TV - collapses distinctions between authentic cultural emblems and mass-produced commodities. This effect underscores the manufactured nature of human zoo displays as spectacles of staged authenticity.
In the new installation, the cage has been restaged with its door open so visitors can step inside and watch a documentary about the original performance playing on a small television within. This gesture shifts the work's meaning: rather than observing the ethnographic gaze from a distance, viewers are invited to experience what it feels like to inhabit its frame. A nearby wall text quotes Los Tigres del Norte: "Even if the cage is made of gold, it is still a prison," echoing Fusco's skepticism about the art world's liberal pieties.
The cage represents the structure of representation itself - one that offers visibility while preserving established hierarchies. To see this piece at El Museo creates a quiet symmetry between an artist who once staged marginalization as spectacle and a museum born from Puerto Rican community organizing against such exclusion. This positioning raises questions about what we expect from critique now and what kind of critical distance remains possible from within institutions.
Nearby archival materials from "La Chavela Realty Company" (1997) address such frictions directly. They show Fusco dressed as Queen Isabel la Católica, the 15th-century monarch who financed Columbus's voyage, offering New World parcels for sale at a dollar apiece. Among the buyers is El Museo del Barrio's former director, whose signed deed now hangs beside photographic documentation and a campy golden gown with ship-shaped headdress designed by artist Pepón Osorio.
Printed over a map and written in irreverent Spanglish, the deed is both grandiose and absurd. Presented in this context, the joke becomes self-referential, a correspondence between artist and institution that leaves open questions about position and whether maintaining proximity to institutions is the only viable mode of holding power accountable.
One of the exhibition's concluding works, "Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word" (2021), offers something like an answer. In it, Fusco rows around Hart Island - the largest mass grave in the United States, where formerly enslaved and unhoused people and victims of epidemics such as COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS are buried - reciting verse by Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz about isolation and endurance. The camera drifts steadily as oars cut through deep blue water while violins draw out mournful, long-held notes.
This allegorical image clarifies Fusco's political stance while circling back to the exhibition's title. To become an island is to maintain autonomy within systems that consume difference, to stay apart without retreating. Across three decades, Fusco has traced what happens when ideology isolates and when nations and individuals retreat behind physical and political borders. Yet the exhibition suggests that becoming an island may also mean claiming autonomy - inhabiting power structures without surrendering to them.
"Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island" continues at El Museo del Barrio through January 11, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Susanna V. Temkin and Rodrigo Moura, presenting a comprehensive view of an artist who has consistently challenged how we see and are seen within institutional frameworks.
