Painting the Town -- Museum of the City of New York

To mark its fiftieth anniversary, in 1973, the Museum of the City of New York organized an ambitious exhibition tracing the heterogeneous history of its East Harlem neighborhood. This multi-media project resulted in the first published survey of the community's long but inadequately studied past.¹ More significantly, it created a critical showcase for art produced by East Harlem's residents -an informal "school" of practicing painters and sculptors whose very existence seemed to startle the city's ordained annalists of contemporary art culture. Among the landscapes and portraits exhibited were a number of sobering views of local life on the mean streets of "El Barrio." El dolor de una madre, in company with depictions of junkies, evictions, and property in crushing disrepair, was one of a half-dozen of those featured canvases acquired for the Museum's permanent collection.

A modernized pietà theme envisioned with a local audience in mind, Allende's painting represents a mother grieving over the corpse of her son, dead of a heroin overdose, in a litter-strewn lot off a bleak East Harlem street. The scene is touching in its allusion to the universality of maternal love while at the same time blunt in rendering the ugliness of drug addiction within an environment itself derelict and devoid of compassion -a concept underscored by the boarded-over windows of the empty tenements forming the scene's backdrop.

The incident memorialized was an outcome all too common for young men of color living in East Harlem by the late 1950s, when the progressive availability of French Connection heroin was wreaking havoc in America's northern urban ghettoes, finding its most vulnerable victims among minority teenaged boys. At a congressional hearing held that same decade, welfare officials detailed a particular three-block area of East Harlem as an exemplar of how drugs were infecting the "slums," testifying that heroin addiction among young male residents had reached "epidemic proportions" and enumerating twenty local establishments where illegal hard drugs were peddled -including an athletic club for teenaged boys.² In his autobiographical novel Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), Claude Brown took measure of heroin's deepening inroads through Harlem, noting, "It seemed to be a kind of plague. Every time I went uptown, somebody else was hooked, somebody else was strung out." In the meantime, neighborhood activists protested the slow public response to the escalating tragedy of local drug use and read this delay as a result of the profile of East Harlem's typical addict, whom statistics identified as young, black, poor, and lacking the cause or credentials to vote.

Angel Allende, born in Puerto Rico, immigrated to New York City in his youth. Few other biographical details are known about his life or exposure to art training. By the 1960s, however, he was participating in several ethnic heritage organizations that promoted communal bonds among East Harlem artists, such as the Grupo des Artistas Latino Americano and the Association for Puerto Rican - Hispanic Culture.³ Contemporaries recall that Allende, who was probably aware of the market appeal of folk painting from the Caribbean Islands, styled himself as a self-taught artist in the native tradition.

Notes:

1 Donald Stewart's sixty-three-page monograph A Short History of East Harlem (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1973) remains the only work in print dedicated to surveying the long settled history of this culturally diverse neighborhood. A full list of East Harlem painters and sculptors who displayed work as part of the 1973 project is in the Museum Archives. It is worth noting that efforts to establish an institutionalized venue for the presentation of artwork by local residents of Puerto Rican heritage predated the Museum's exhibition, with the 1969 founding of El Museo del Barrio. This museum, which led a peripatetic existence for the next seven years, moving from a public school classroom to a brownstone on East 116th Street to a series of storefront quarters, found a permanent home in the Heckscher Building at 1234 Fifth Avenue in 1977. Today, its mission has broadened to exhibit and promote the artistic heritage of Latin Americans, primarily in the United States.

2 For a contextual account of the East Harlem community's struggles with heroin's invasion in the years following World War II, see Jill Jonnes, Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of America's Romance with Illegal Drugs (New York: Scribner, 1996), pp. 136 -145. The painting is reproduced in her text. Since its 1973 acquisition by the Museum, Allende's canvas has been requested frequently as a loan to special exhibitions attempting to interpret aspects of America's twentieth-century drug wars, such as the Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum's Altered States: Alcohol and Other Drugs in America, 1992.

3 In an effort to augment the artist's biography, Museum curatorial staff wrote to a number of East Harlem artists and community activists who participated in the planning of the 1973 East Harlem exhibition, but few could supply more than incidental details about Allende. A former associate from Grupo des Artistas Latino Americano reported that Allende had died in 1997 and that his family remained in Puerto Rico. See correspondence in the Museum Archives.


El dolor de una madre (The Sorrow of a Mother; also exhibited as A Mother's Pain in East Harlem), 1972 Angel E. Allende (d. 1997) Oil on canvas, 70 x 50 Signed lower right corner: A. E. Allende / 1972 Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Wallace Gilmore, 73.153.3
To mark its fiftieth anniversary, in 1973, the Museum of the City of New York organized an ambitious exhibition tracing the heterogeneous history of its East Harlem neighborhood. This multi-media project resulted in the first published survey of the community's long but inadequately studied past.¹ More significantly, it created a critical showcase for art produced by East Harlem's residents -an informal "school" of practicing painters and sculptors whose very existence seemed to startle the city's ordained annalists of contemporary art culture. Among the landscapes and portraits exhibited were a number of sobering views of local life on the mean streets of "El Barrio." El dolor de una madre, in company with depictions of junkies, evictions, and property in crushing disrepair, was one of a half-dozen of those featured canvases acquired for the Museum's permanent collection. A modernized pietà theme envisioned with a local audience in mind, Allende's painting represents a mother grieving over the corpse of her son, dead of a heroin overdose, in a litter-strewn lot off a bleak East Harlem street. The scene is touching in its allusion to the universality of maternal love while at the same time blunt in rendering the ugliness of drug addiction within an environment itself derelict and devoid of compassion -a concept underscored by the boarded-over windows of the empty tenements forming the scene's backdrop. The incident memorialized was an outcome all too common for young men of color living in East Harlem by the late 1950s, when the progressive availability of French Connection heroin was wreaking havoc in America's northern urban ghettoes, finding its most vulnerable victims among minority teenaged boys. At a congressional hearing held that same decade, welfare officials detailed a particular three-block area of East Harlem as an exemplar of how drugs were infecting the "slums," testifying that heroin addiction among young male residents had reached "epidemic proportions" and enumerating twenty local establishments where illegal hard drugs were peddled -including an athletic club for teenaged boys.² In his autobiographical novel Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), Claude Brown took measure of heroin's deepening inroads through Harlem, noting, "It seemed to be a kind of plague. Every time I went uptown, somebody else was hooked, somebody else was strung out." In the meantime, neighborhood activists protested the slow public response to the escalating tragedy of local drug use and read this delay as a result of the profile of East Harlem's typical addict, whom statistics identified as young, black, poor, and lacking the cause or credentials to vote. Angel Allende, born in Puerto Rico, immigrated to New York City in his youth. Few other biographical details are known about his life or exposure to art training. By the 1960s, however, he was participating in several ethnic heritage organizations that promoted communal bonds among East Harlem artists, such as the Grupo des Artistas Latino Americano and the Association for Puerto Rican - Hispanic Culture.³ Contemporaries recall that Allende, who was probably aware of the market appeal of folk painting from the Caribbean Islands, styled himself as a self-taught artist in the native tradition. Notes: 1 Donald Stewart's sixty-three-page monograph A Short History of East Harlem (New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1973) remains the only work in print dedicated to surveying the long settled history of this culturally diverse neighborhood. A full list of East Harlem painters and sculptors who displayed work as part of the 1973 project is in the Museum Archives. It is worth noting that efforts to establish an institutionalized venue for the presentation of artwork by local residents of Puerto Rican heritage predated the Museum's exhibition, with the 1969 founding of El Museo del Barrio. This museum, which led a peripatetic existence for the next seven years, moving from a public school classroom to a brownstone on East 116th Street to a series of storefront quarters, found a permanent home in the Heckscher Building at 1234 Fifth Avenue in 1977. Today, its mission has broadened to exhibit and promote the artistic heritage of Latin Americans, primarily in the United States. 2 For a contextual account of the East Harlem community's struggles with heroin's invasion in the years following World War II, see Jill Jonnes, Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of America's Romance with Illegal Drugs (New York: Scribner, 1996), pp. 136 -145. The painting is reproduced in her text. Since its 1973 acquisition by the Museum, Allende's canvas has been requested frequently as a loan to special exhibitions attempting to interpret aspects of America's twentieth-century drug wars, such as the Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum's Altered States: Alcohol and Other Drugs in America, 1992. 3 In an effort to augment the artist's biography, Museum curatorial staff wrote to a number of East Harlem artists and community activists who participated in the planning of the 1973 East Harlem exhibition, but few could supply more than incidental details about Allende. A former associate from Grupo des Artistas Latino Americano reported that Allende had died in 1997 and that his family remained in Puerto Rico. See correspondence in the Museum Archives.