The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center Announces Historias Reveladas
THE CLEMENTE SOTO VÉLEZ CULTURAL AND EDUCATIONAL CENTER ANNOUNCES
HISTORIAS REVELADAS
AN EXHIBITION OF MORE THAN 50 ARTISTS
CELEBRATING LATINX CULTURAL CONTRIBUTIONS AS CENTRAL
TO NEW YORK CITY’S PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
INAUGURATING ALL FIVE FLOORS OF THE NEWLY RENOVATED CLEMENTE CENTER
October 15, 2026 – May 2, 2027
107 Suffolk Street, New York, NY
Natalia Lassalle, Untitled Sugar Project (2025-2026).
NEW YORK, NY — June 25, 2026 — The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center announces Historias Reveladas, a major building-wide exhibition to culminate Historias, a multiyear art and humanities initiative charting Latinx impact in NYC since the turn of the 20th century. Opening on October 15, 2026, Reveladas will mark the grand opening of The Clemente’s newly renovated and ADA-accessible building, activating all five floors with contemporary artwork, installations, archives, and new commissions by more than 50 artists and organizations.
“Reveladas asks New York to look again,” said Libertad Guerra, Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Clemente. “The city’s history is incomplete without the Latinx labor, memory, artistry, migration, spiritual practice, and neighborhood life that have shaped it for generations. For The Clemente, this work goes beyond representation. It lives in the building, in the artists we sustain, in the archives we activate, and now in a renovated cultural center that will be accessible across all floors for the first time. At its core, Reveladas is about shared infrastructure: who gets remembered, who gets to produce culture, who has access to space, and how a city tells the truth about itself. It is both an exhibition and a public invitation to see the Nueva York inside New York, and to come into direct contact with histories that have always been here, often hidden in plain sight.”
The exhibition marks a defining moment for The Clemente: the reopening of a landmark Puerto Rican/Latinx cultural institution following a major accessibility renovation. As the first exhibition to activate the building’s renovated galleries and public spaces, Historias Reveladas inaugurates a new chapter for the organization while reaffirming its longstanding role as a cultural anchor for the Lower East Side and Latinx communities throughout New York City.
Presented in collaboration with the Latinx Arts Consortium of New York (LxNY), Reveladas is built upon the belief that the history of New York City is incomplete without the narratives of Latinx communities. Through contemporary commissions, archival materials, oral histories, sound works, and public activations, the exhibition traces histories of labor, migration, spiritual practice, embodied knowledge, everyday life, cultural memory, and urban transformation.
Each commission in Reveladas is anchored in fact-based histories, and connected to entries on The Nueva York Chronicles (NY.C.), the Clemente’s digital mapping and storytelling repository. The platform plots Latinx contributions to New York City across decades, neighborhoods, site types and communities creating a permanent public record that extends the exhibition beyond the gallery.
Irma Verduzco, Stitches of Borderland Memory, 2025. Artwork created as part of Frontier of Wandering Spirits, Cinthya Santos Briones’s migrant women embroidery circles in New York City.
The exhibition is anchored by fifteen new artist commissions, including:
- Cinthya Santos Briones, Frontier of Wandering Spirits (2024-2026): A multimedia installation created in tandem with border advocacy groups that archives abandoned belongings and honors migrants who have disappeared crossing the Rio Grande Valley, connecting the physical border to New York City as a site shaped by migration, memory, policy, and family separation.
- Zacarías González & Chong Gu, Carry (For Historias) (2026): A collaborative, community-based project that adapts its mobile, modular structures to the Lower East Side, bringing together storytelling, food traditions, oral histories, and communal gatherings in an interactive installation that functions as both an archive and a site for ongoing exchange.
- Pablo Helguera, Fonoteca (2026): A public archive of Latinx diasporic vinyl records, inviting visitors to engage in communal storytelling, intergenerational dialogue, and collective memory-building.
- Berta Jottar, The Drum is Omnipresent (2026): An interactive sculptural installation that traces rumba’s history of celebration, criminalization, and survival, from colonial rule to the Giuliani era, transforming archival footage into a diasporic soundscape of spirituality, resistance, and collective memory.
- Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Xenia Rubinos, Untitled Sugar Project (2025-2026): A video installation and performance tracing the history of the U.S sugar industry from Puerto Rico to the Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, using choral compositions taken from worker testimonies.
- Christian Martir, LATIN NY: EL CLUB (2026): An immersive installation that transforms Izzy Sanabria’s influential 1970s magazine into a walk-in nightclub, using sculpture, archival footage, and music to celebrate Nuyorican identity and the role of Latinx nightlife in shaping New York City’s cultural history.
- Sokio, Gordon Matta-Clark, Francisca Benítez, and Lucia Cuba: Splitting/Absence (2026): A multidisciplinary installation by New Latin Wave (Sokio and Amanda Riesman) that builds on Sokio’s opera on Gordon Matta-Clark’s enduring influence on downtown New York. The installation includes archival materials, contemporary commissions, and works by Matta-Clark to show the collaborative spirit that defined his practice.
- Manny Vega, Portal of Memory Mosaic (2026): A site-specific series of eight mosaics for The Clemente’s historic foyer that marks the building’s transformation from public school to cultural center, honoring the Caribbean histories, artistic legacies, and community resilience embedded in the Lower East Side.
- Elizabeth Velazquez: Atalaya Celestial: Las matriarcas (2026): A site-specific installation that creates a space for collective remembrance and ritual, honoring Puerto Rican women poets through sculptural forms, place-based materials, and a participatory element inviting visitors to contribute the names of other poetisas.
Additional commissions include projects by Máximo Colon, Alva Mooses & Mauricio Cortes Ortega, Montez Press Radio, Lucia della Paolera & Seth Tillett, Samantha Sacks (in collaboration with Jonathan González, Claudia Hilda, and Hilary Seeley), and Edwin Torres. A robust series of public programming will accompany Reveladas throughout the exhibition to engage audiences with artist commissions and other presented works. Ongoing Historias Signature series – Remesas y Sobremesa, Domino Table Talks, Historias in Motion, and CRUCES – will continue through the exhibition at The Clemente and with partner institutions across four boroughs.
The complete artist list for Reveladas will be announced in August 2026, followed by a schedule of public programs and citywide partnerships in September 2026. A media preview will be held on Wednesday, October 14, 2026. Please reach out to katrina@bluemedium.com for more information. For further details, please visit historias.nyc/reveladas.
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About The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center
Founded in 1993, The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center is a Puerto Rican/Latinx multi-arts institution rooted in New York City’s Lower East Side/Loisaida. Housed in a former public school building at 107 Suffolk Street, The Clemente supports artists, small arts organizations, and community producers through affordable space, exhibitions, performances, public humanities programs, and cross-disciplinary cultural work.
For more than three decades, The Clemente has served as a home for Puerto Rican, Latinx, multicultural, and experimental arts in downtown New York. Its work brings together heritage preservation, neighborhood history, contemporary art, performance, and civic dialogue, sustaining cultural production as a shared public resource.
The Clemente is a co-founder/partner of LxNY Consortium and the Coalition of Small Arts NYC (CoSA NYC).
About LxNY
LxNY | Latinx Arts Consortium of New York is a peer network of 50 + Latinx-serving arts organizations working across New York City. Formed in 2020, LxNY advances knowledge exchange, resource-sharing, advocacy, and collective action to address the historic underfunding of Latinx arts and cultural institutions.
Through its member organizations, LxNY supports artists, culture bearers, community-based institutions, and public programs that reflect the breadth of Latinx cultural life in New York City.
About Historias
Historias is a multi-year, citywide art and public humanities initiative led by The Clemente that re-centers Latinx cultural narratives in New York City through exhibitions, commissions, performances, oral histories, archival research, digital storytelling, and public programs. Presented in partnership with the Latinx Arts Consortium of New York and launched with key support from the Rauschenberg Foundation, Historias unfolds across three phases: Sembradas, Entrecruzadas, and Reveladas, each grounded in research, collaboration, and community engagement.
At its core, Historias uses cultural work to counter erasure and reshape how New York understands its own history. Bringing together artists, scholars, researchers, community partners, and cultural organizations, the initiative examines how Latinx communities have shaped the city’s neighborhoods, labor histories, spiritual practices, artistic movements, economies, and built environment. Its digital platform and repository, Nueva York Chronicles, extends this work through a public map and timeline connecting people, places, events, and cultural movements across the city.
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For images, further background, or interviews, please contact:
Katrina Stewart
Account Manager, Visual Arts
Blue Medium
T: +1-212-675-1800
Fernando Salazar
Communications Manager
LxNY