Beginning in 1961, Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz (b. 1934) systematically destroyed chairs, couches, mattresses, and other domestic objects as part of a series he titled Archaeological Finds. When displayed on the wall, their twisted, fractured, ripped, and broken remains hang at nearly human scale and only hint at the domestic furnishings they once were. In his “Destructivism: A Manifesto” (1962), Ortiz stated that as a “man-made object is released from and transcends its logically determined form.…[an artist] is also released from and transcends his logical self.” When exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, critics and curators in the 1960s described Ortiz’s Archaeological Finds as “powerful,” “horrifying,” “revolting,” “repellent,” “a disgust object,” “the embodiment of a nightmare,” “sinister,” “disturbing,” and “repulsive.”⁠ While the authors are not neutral sources, each descriptor implies that, in disassembling the “logically determined form,” Ortiz also distorted aesthetic evaluations of taste and comfort. 

By the start of the next decade, Ortiz had become more explicit, accosting aesthetic values when he spoke at the Museum of Modern Art in his role as founding director of El Museo del Barrio, a museum by and for Puerto Ricans in East Harlem. Ortiz forcefully challenged the cultural institutions of New York, suggesting that their judgments of quality and value uphold the “culture of the conquerors” and directly contribute to the dehumanization and exploitation of Puerto Ricans. He emphasized that investing in Puerto Rican artists is an investment in the Puerto Rican struggle “to release ourselves from the oppressive colonial notions of who we are and why we are and what we will be.” A native New Yorker, Ortiz came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, moving between his parents’ apartment in the Lower East Side and his extended family’s apartments in East Harlem, both established Puerto Rican enclaves. These years were marked by increased scrutiny of the growing population of Puerto Ricans who, despite being US citizens, were framed as an unwelcome group of immigrants whose inability to assimilate and adapt to New York City was actively causing urban regression into criminality, drug addiction, and poverty. 

My research at the Center is focused on my book project, “Methods of Encounter: Raphael Montañez Ortiz and an Anti-Colonial Alternative Art,” which analyzes the philosophical and methodological relationships between Ortiz’s overt confrontation of culture’s role in colonization and imperialism and his commitment to an artistic practice of destruction and psychological undoing from 1961 to 1971. During this same period, Ortiz created numerous Archaeological Finds; performed destructions at international events such as the 1966 London Destruction in Art Symposium; founded El Museo del Barrio; participated and protested with the Art Workers’ Coalition; and curated a multimedia exhibition, Boricua: Aquí y Allá (Puerto Ricans: Here and There), at the American Museum of Natural History. 

Ortiz’s activities in the 1960s were diverse in approach, blending his extensive reading in psychoanalysis, anthropology, and media studies with his own engagement with contemporary experiments in artmaking—which saw success within the explosion of alternative art venues in New York that supported ephemeral or event-based projects. Ortiz worked alongside artists engaged in happenings, Fluxus, and other works that investigated perception, daily life, and non-object-oriented creation. Yet, Ortiz’s projects indicate that reordering perception and comfort were methodological tools for the aforementioned “release,” which would have profound implications for dismantling unconscious Euro-American colonial values. With Ortiz as the primary subject and interlocutor, my project traces the connections among ephemeral and non-object-based art practices, Puerto Rican migration, social science research into poverty and social adaptation, New York urban studies, and the role of ethnic cultural nationalism in civil rights movements. 

Oberlin College and Conservatory
Beinecke Postdoctoral Fellow, 2025–2027

During the forthcoming 2026–2027 academic year, Ana Cristina Perry will spend the second half of her residency at the Center as the Beinecke Postdoctoral Fellow.