Coco Fusco, “A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America” (2006–8), performance documentation (image courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM; all other photos Clara Maria Apostolatos/Hyperallergic)

Few artists have examined the ethnographic gaze as closely — or turned it as deftly back on itself — as Coco Fusco. Across her career, she has inhabited a succession of roles — museum specimen, interrogator, colonial queen, subaltern laborer — to expose the systems that produce them. Her works, whether filmed, staged, or photographed, return to that charged encounter so that what began as performances about being looked at has evolved into frameworks for looking back: at surveillance, at the museum’s apparatus of display, at the camera’s complicity, at the viewer’s own position within it. Fusco’s first United States retrospective, Tomorrow I Will Become an Island at El Museo del Barrio, traces this evolving choreography of perception.

The show is divided into four loosely thematic sections titled “Migration,” “Cultural Encounter,” “Interrogation,” and “Poetry and Power.” In “Els Segadors” (2023), part of the first section, a diverse grouping of Catalans recites the centuries-old anthem of independence — banned during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in the mid-20th century and later revived as a symbol of sovereignty — reflecting on what the song now means to them. Filmed in a single, frontal frame and intercut with candid exchanges between Fusco and her participants, the work lets the performance slowly fray: pride gives way to hesitation, patriotism to unease, until talk of belonging turns to acknowledgements of exclusion. Voices slip between Catalan and Spanish, color alternates with grayscale, and the anthem mutates through salsa, folk, and rap. Each shift introduces a hybridity that unsettles a fixed sense of Catalan identity; each slippage loosens the seams of the nationalist script it supposedly restages.

Installation view of Coco Fusco, “La Plaza Vacía (The Empty Plaza)” (2012), HD Video, 11:53 min

“Els Segadors” unfolds from a script that gradually breaks open, a form that applies to much of her work, including her photographs. Rounding out the same gallery, for instance, is a continuous band of black and white portraits depicting immigrants, friends, and strangers alike, posed against urban and domestic backdrops. Taken over the past year — a period shadowed by immigration raids — “Everyone Who Lives Here Is a New Yorker” (2025) initially reads as a set of informal yet intimate portraits. Only when we cross the room to encounter Augustus Frederick Sherman and Lewis Hine’s early-20th-century photographs of immigrants, hung in a grid, does it become clear that Fusco has staged her sitters to mirror the archival compositions. The people in “Venezuelan family in Queens” sit in a neat alignment echoing Sherman’s “English Family at Ellis Island” (undated), while the beaming subjects in “Ecuadorian child vendors” holding bouquets reanimate Hine’s “Child Vendors, Bowery, 1910,” their smiles lending warmth to an iconic image once used to spur legislation around child labor. Notably, though her photographs are explicit citations of immigrant portraiture, they position people not by the conditions of their arrival but in the particular ways they belong to New York.

That studied quality defines much of the retrospective. Fusco’s performances often borrow from institutional procedures: She recreates military drills in “A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America” (2006–08) and enrolls in an immersive simulation and workshop on military interrogation in “Operation Atropos” (2006), dissecting the grammar of disciplinary systems. Her videos carry the same investigative and elegiac impulse. Works such as “La confesión” and “La Plaza vacía” (both 2012) consider Cuban national memory, splicing found footage, oral histories, historical documents, partial testimonies, and Fusco’s measured voice-over to trace the afterlives of the Cuban revolution. Watching the hours of accumulated testimony and archival fragments feels like joining her in the act of sifting. She speaks with the cadence of a reporter — methodical, informed, occasionally weary. Her editing, however, reveals an equally strong pull toward metaphor: Long takes of the deserted Plaza de la Revolución watched over by the monumental steel portraits of Castro and Che Guevara alternate with archival footage of military spectacle, the vacant square and its flattened icons mirroring the hollowed-out ideals of the revolution itself.

Detail of Coco Fusco, “Everyone Who Lives Here is a New Yorker” (2025), 12 sets of pigment prints

Part of the “Cultural Encounter” section is a room that revisits Fusco’s earliest and most overt acts of institutional critique. “Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit The West” (1992–94), made with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, is represented through photo documentation and a reconstruction of the original cage. It satirizes the enclosures once used to display Indigenous peoples at world’s fairs and museums, a practice that continued well into the 20th century, as a timeline on the wall makes clear. The artists — dressed in hand-sewn grass skirts, leather wristbands, and red face paint or masks — pose as “undiscovered natives,” staging an ethnographic fantasy of “discovery” and display. The cage’s mix of props — a Kahlúa Tiki decanter on a European-capitals tablecloth beside a Mickey Mouse rug and TV — collapses distinctions between “authentic” cultural emblem and mass-produced commodity. The effect underscores the manufactured nature of such “human zoo” displays as spectacles of staged authenticity — a dynamic that, Fusco and Gómez-Peña imply, museums risk repeating when they package non-Western cultures for display.

In this new installation, the cage has been restaged with its door open so that visitors can step inside and watch a documentary on the original performance playing on a small television within. The gesture shifts the work’s meaning: Rather than observing the ethnographic gaze from a distance, viewers are invited to experience what it feels like to inhabit its frame. Nearby, a wall text quotes a song by Los Tigres del Norte: “Even if the cage is made of gold, it is still a prison,” a line that echoes Fusco’s own skepticism about the art world’s liberal pieties. The cage, in this sense, stands for the structure of representation itself — one that offers visibility while preserving established hierarchies.

Installation view of Coco Fusco, “Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West” (1992/2025), multimedia installation

Still, the question remains: What exactly do we expect from critique now? To see this piece here in El Museo is to face a quiet symmetry between an artist who once staged marginalization as spectacle and a museum born from the Puerto Rican community organizing against such exclusion. Nearby archival materials from the 1997 work “La Chavela Realty Company” seem to address such frictions directly. They show Fusco dressed as Queen Isabel la Católica, the 15th-century monarch who financed Columbus’s voyage, offering parcels of the New World for sale at a dollar apiece. Among the “buyers” is El Museo del Barrio’s former director, whose signed deed now hangs beside photographic documentation and a campy golden gown with ship-shaped headdress designed by artist Pepón Osorio. Printed over a map and written in irreverent Spanglish, the deed is both grandiose and absurd. Presented here, the joke becomes self-referential, a correspondence between artist and institution. It leaves open a question of position — what kind of critical distance is still possible from the inside? Is maintaining proximity to institutions the only viable mode of holding power accountable?

One of the concluding works, “Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word”* *(2021), offers something like an answer. In it, Fusco rows around Hart Island — the largest mass grave in the United States, where formerly enslaved and unhoused people and victims of epidemics such as COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS are buried — reciting a verse by Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz about isolation and endurance. The camera drifts steadily, oars cutting through deep blue water, while violins draw out mournful, long-held notes. The allegorical image clarifies Fusco’s political stance as well as circles back to the exhibition’s title. To “become an island” is to maintain autonomy within systems that consume difference, to stay apart without retreating. Across three decades, Fusco has traced what happens when ideology isolates, when nations and individuals retreat behind physical and political borders. Yet the exhibition suggests that to “become an island” may also be to claim autonomy, to inhabit the structures of power without surrendering to them.

Installation view of Coco Fusco, “La Chavela Realty Company” (1991) (left) and performance documentation of “La Chavela Realty Company” (1991) (right)

Installation view of Coco Fusco, “Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word” (2021)

Installation view of Coco Fusco, “Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West” (1992/2025), multimedia installation

Installation view of Coco Fusco, “La confesión (The Confession)” (2015), HD Video, 33:06 minutes

Installation view of Coco Fusco, “La Chavela Realty Company” (1991)

Installation view of photos by Augustus Frederick Sherman and Lewis Hine

Installation view of Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island

Installation view of Coco Fusco, “Els Segadors (The Reapers)” (2001), video, 22 min

Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island *continues at El Museo del Barrio (1230 5th Avenue, East Harlem, New York) through January 11, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Susanna V. Temkin and Rodrigo Moura. *

Clara Maria Apostolatos is an art historian specializing in contemporary Latin American art and the 2023–25 Kress Interpretive Fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. More by Clara Maria Apostolatos