El Museo del Barrio - Art - Review - New York Times

“This is to be expected at El Museo del Barrio, a museum devoted to Latino and Latin American art (that is, art by artists of Latin American descent living in this country, and Latin American artists or émigrés living abroad). At the same time you feel the growing pains and attempts to stretch out in the fifth edition ”” the largest yet ”” of “The (S) Files.” Short for “the selected files,” the show provides a survey of 51 emerging artists working in New York and from this year’s invited “guest country,” Ecuador.

Some of the works, like Eduardo Gil’s installation, “Atlas of Bolí­var,” distinctly consider location, displacement and identity. Mr. Gil has assembled a display of objects ”” postcards, matchbooks, police badges, license plates ”” from towns in the United States named after the 19th-century Venezuelan independence-movement leader Simón Bolí­var. They both allude to the current tensions between the United States and Venezuela and poignantly mirror the way immigrants see reflections of their old land in their new one. Mr. Gil calls each object in the display a “memento without borders.”

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