El Museo del Barrio, a gem located in the heart of East Harlem, has opened its doors to the city with a summer lineup featuring exhibits "Rodriguez Calero: Urban Martyrs and Latter Day Santos," "Cut N' Mix: Contemporary Collage" and "Presente! The Young Lords in New York."

From July 22 until October 17, visitors will be able to enjoy the dynamic collection, which features a variety of work. There are pieces by established and new generation artists experimenting with collage technique. The lineup also includes the latest installment of the new annual female artist retrospective series, which highlights the faultless work of Nuyorican artist Rodriguez Calero. And finally, the museum presents a display that explores the legacy of the Young Lords in the Bronx, East Harlem and the Lower East Side.

"It's going to be a Nuyorican summer at El Museo," said Jorge Daniel Veneciano, Executive Director, El Museo del Barrio, in a statement, "especially with exhibitions on Rodríguez Calero and the Young Lords. Greater recognition for the hip-hop and Byzantine work of Rodríguez Calero is long overdue. No one in contemporary art makes a clearer case for collage as the natural medium for hip-hop culture than she does. Cut N' Mix shows us how other Latino artists advance the hip-hop aesthetic of layering in collage work."

Rodríguez Calero's collection, which was curated by Alejandro Anreus, focuses on the artist's figurative work in the mediums of painting, collage and photography, as well as a fusion of popular urban/hip hop cultural figures, Renaissance and religious motifs and iconography. Calero's "acrollage" canvases, fotacroles, smaller collages and mixed media pieces capture tension and ceaseless symbolism, transcending urban centers and Latino experience in the U.S. and abroad with marked regularity and divinity. The introspective pieces are injected with beauty, richness and conversation.

"I didn't take me long time to develop my style because people always recognized my work as being different, and when trying to explain the I did, I decided to give it a term, and that's how I came up with the acrollage. It's basically acrylic and collage, hence the name," Calero told Latin Post. "When I was younger, I went to museums and was fascinated by the art: earlier works by the Egyptian artists, and I loved a lot of the Spanish artists, Vasquez and Picasso, but I was really more thrilled by minimalists. I feel that my figures are abstract, and the abstracts feel figurative. I was fortunate, when I went to Puerto Rico, because my style developed, in part, by studying under master printer Lorenzo Homar, a silkscreen artist.

"The way I work with my paintings, it's almost like big prints," Calero added. "The earlier work has more appropriated images, and later I started to use images that I captured. It's the evolution of my work, finding and developing; there are some people whose imagery I take in like symbols." 

When choosing different images to combine for her framed works, Calero said it's a bit like a ouija board: images in trays collected and arranged, paint is poured and the artist captures social and political messages, which everyone, of all ages and ethnicities, can interpret and identify with.

"Everything is evolving, everyday we're evolving, and it's part of the process. What I do, what is created next, it depends what's happening. I'm really an intuitive painter, it's not that I don't have a sense of technique, but really it's best to know how to push your pieces, always. I don't want to be satisfied because you can be satisfied with something simple," said Calero. "I'm very honored that Alejandro Anreus, the curator, just invited me. It's home. It's the community, I've worked in this community, and really it's a great honor to be here, and to be a Puerto Rican woman is a honor because there is a tendency to show Puerto Rican men. But, it's really the work that stands out, if I say so myself." 

"Cut N' Mix: Contemporary Collage" complements Calero's review, exploring experimental collage techniques that visit various mediums. In some cases, artists utilized radical processes to create both traditional and "extreme" collages, involving sound, drawings, linoleum, plastic, wood and other items. The exhibit features the work of more than two dozen veterans and newcomers.

"I found the idea of making several versions of a song by laying new sounds over older ones and mixing them up was an interesting metaphor for the process of collage. It seems particularly malleable, allowing artists working in all mediums to explore collage's vast possibilities," said exhibition curator Rocio Aranda-Alvarado in a statement.

"Presente! The Young Lords in New York" explores the legacy of the social and political group, and examines their relationship to art and activism. Photography by Hiram Maristany highlights the Young Lords' "Garbage Initiative," their takeover of the First Spanish Methodist Church of East Harlem, the rerouting of TB-testing truck, their free morning breakfast program and the funeral of Julio Roldan. Political prints and paintings from El Museo's permanent collection are also on display, particularly works commissioned by Miguel Luciano and Shelleyne Rodriguez. This exhibition is also on display at The Bronx Museum of Art (July 2- September 13) and Loisaida Inc. (July 25- September 23).

El Museo del Barrio is located at 1230 Fifth Avenue at 104 Street in New York City. Hours are Tuesday though Saturday, 11am to 6pm.