Coco Fusco’s breakout came three decades ago at a high watermark of debates over identity politics and multiculturalism, movements she has assiduously critiqued ever since. Now in a political climate that parallels the conditions of her early rise, Fusco’s first mid-career survey in the US, Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island is on view at El Museo del Barrio in New York. The exhibition, curated by Susanna V. Temkin and Rodrigo Moura, spans performance, video, photography, and installation. It traverses Catalonian nationalism, Cuban poetry, Mexican maquiladoras, and the surveillance of Angela Davis. Throughout, the exigency of the artist’s practice is felt. Although there is a risk that her insistence can read as instruction, the show’s real argument emerges in accumulation: a sustained dedication to the raced, gendered, migrant, and laboring body caught in the crosshairs of colonial and state powers.
Fusco has faced critiques of didacticism over the course of her career, and viewing her works discretely, it is possible to see why. Her individual artworks can be so rigorously studied and uniquely immersed in local context that they feel like hermetically self-contained theses. But collectively, they acquire momentum, and they are even more propulsive amid the current US culture wars, global polarization, and democratic backsliding. In turning backward, the exhibition makes a compelling case for Fusco as one of the artists most equipped to respond to this moment of renewed political and cultural conservatism.
Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia, The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey, 1993. Video still. Collection of El Museo del Barrio.
In the opening of “Passionate Irreverence: The Cultural Politics of Identity,” an essay Fusco wrote for the 1993 Whitney Biennial, she laid out her thesis of the present. First, she explained that world-historical forces—economic globalization, geopolitical realignment in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union—redirected flows of capital and prompted new migration pathways. As a result, anxieties surrounding national identity intensified, directing phobic energies toward those perceived to be outside the diminishing domain of the state, which included (and includes) migrants, people of color, women, and queer folks. Ultimately, cultural institutions and art spaces, some predisposed toward caution given their own histories and collections, absorbed these phobic energies, making the questions Fusco asked in her art and writing all the more pointed: Whose past? Whose museum? Who authors these representations? Whose culture is at the center? If it is no longer novel to critique the colonial foundations of the museum, this is in part due to Fusco. Along with peers, namely Fred Wilson, Fusco helped usher in a second wave of institutional critique that exorcised colonial phantoms and interrogated the ways race, ethnicity, gender, and class transform how art is seen.
The slim and tightly curated show includes a mere sliver of Fusco’s work but distills it into four significant thematic clusters: “Immigrant Narratives,” “Intercultural Misunderstandings,” “Interrogation Tactics,” and “Poetry and Power.” Her breakout piece, a collaboration with Guillermo Gómez Peña, features prominently in the “Intercultural Misunderstandings” section. Fusco and Gómez Peña made Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–94) on the quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, touring the world dressed as the inhabitants of an apocryphal “undiscovered” island in the Gulf of Mexico. The show situates a replica of the gold-colored cage that Fusco and Gómez Peña occupied, alongside a video, photos, and prints that document the performance while also gesturing to the riot of responses it engendered. This collaboration was transformed by its audience, whose responses included begging to feed the performers bananas and making sexual advances. By turning the gaze back onto their viewers, Fusco and Gómez Peña exposed a continuity between colonial ways of looking, in which people were treated as ethnographic specimens or oddities, and the viewing habits of contemporary audiences. Fusco has wryly described the early 1990s as a moment of “happy multiculturalism,” when liberals imagined themselves as blind to race and seemingly progressive institutions refused to acknowledge the ways they reinforced the cultural orientalism and racism they ostensibly decried. In Two Undiscovered Amerindians, multiculturalism instead emerges as a gilded cage.
Coco Fusco, La confesión (The Confession), 2015. Video still. Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM.
Culture, for Fusco, is not inherent but immanent, not what you are but what you do. Her ongoing, studied, and frequently collaborative challenge of multiculturalism’s essentialist reification of identity comes to the fore in “Poetry and Power,” the exhibition’s final section. The segment is anchored by a series of videos, several focusing on Cuba. While Fusco has familial ties to the island, she approaches Cuba not as an origin to be reclaimed but, more broadly, as a subject of study that offers insights on culture and politics. In La confesión (The Confession, 2015), she assumes the role of unauthorized historian to document a foundational case of cultural suppression, the so-called Padilla Affair. Oscillating between archives and Fusco’s own footage, the video essay traces the events of 1971, when the Cuban government labeled the poet Heberto Padilla a counterrevolutionary and coerced him into confessing his insubordination for a book of poems that alluded to authoritarianism in an ostensible socialist utopia. Fusco’s footage lingers in haunted spaces of emptiness and silence: the hotel where Padilla was detained and surveilled and the writer’s union where he confessed, both of which are shown in states of near abandon. Channeling the poetic language of her subject, the video takes on a more subdued and desultory quality. By juxtaposing affect and intimacy with analytic distance, these scenes present silence and emptiness as the consequences of the circumscription of culture and political discourse. In this video and others, Fusco presents histories of cultural suppression not as reminders of a bygone past but in the context of a retrenchment of artistic liberties and the ongoing incarceration of artists like Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara.
The earliest work in “Poetry and Power” contains its most indelible image. In La plaza vacía (The Empty Plaza, 2012), the very same plaza—Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución—that thronged with euphorically enthusiastic supporters more than half-century ago is all but deserted. This evacuation of the country’s symbolic center serves as a metaphor for the abdication of civic and political space writ large in a moment of ascendant authoritarianism on the island, if not also well beyond. In the United States, where Fusco lives, we are witnessing xenophobic migration policies and raids that terrorize our communities. Last year, ICE deported nearly 327,000 people and thirty-two others died in detention. Since the exhibition opened, a resurgent militarism has led to extrajudicial killings at sea, claiming at least 123 lives, and a full takeover of Venezuela. Drawing on both her early-career impulse toward wily historical exorcism and a more recent poetic sensibility, Fusco confronts the present by gesturing in two directions. First, in Everyone Who Lives Here Is a New Yorker (2025), a series of photographs that appear right at the start of the exhibition, she offers a corrective to contemporary migration discourse. The series restages social documentarian Lewis Hine’s and Augustus Frederick Sherman’s Ellis Island photographs from more than a century ago with charismatic yet unassuming black-and-white portraits of more recent immigrants to the United States. Restrained and magnanimous, the images push against reductive categories, opting instead to portray their subjects as a great many things—the Cuban performer Carlos, the Egyptian scholar Nada, and a Venezuelan family in Brooklyn, among others. The photographs make an enduring case for migrants as constitutive to the city, as opposed to marginal, and foundational, as opposed to destabilizing.
Coco Fusco, La plaza vacía (The Empty Plaza), 2012. Video still. Collection of El Museo del Barrio.
An earlier version of this project debuted on screens across the city ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, and, on the other side of that election, Fusco appears to have returned to the incendiary provocations of her early career. This sensibility comes through in The Siren, a satirical newspaper she cofounded with Noah Fischer and Pablo Helguera, which is intermittently available at El Museo. The most recent edition’s headline warns, “Culture Wars 3.0: MAGA is Coming for the Arts,” features scores of political cartoons, and closes its editorial with a call to “abolish ICE and deport ignorance.” Together, these more recent projects reveal an artist moving fluidly between pause and propulsion as well as empathy and indictment, and insisting that both remembrance and critique are essential for navigating the present.
The exhibition’s title, Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island, borrowed from Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera, describes a self that is transformed into an archipelagic formation, something with the capacity to bear witness to forces like history in a way that transcends human limitations. This is an apt description of how Fusco’s art functions, after the artist has spent three decades excoriating colonial phantoms and the flattening effects of cultural conservatism. And yet, I would also argue that Fusco’s work is a map and a horizon, recalling José Esteban Muñoz’s approach to tracing where we have been in a way that, at the very same time, gazes ahead. Amid today’s headlong dive into cultural conservatism, Fusco opens a space for political clarity that refuses pragmatic deference or resignation. Island, map, and horizon all at once, Fusco’s art is politically engaged and refuses the convenience of simple distinctions, inviting rigor, tenderness, reckoning, and futurity to coexist.
