At first glance, Binghamton University Art Museum’s new exhibition, “Joy, Play and Resistance in the Work of Miguel Luciano and Hiram Maristany,” resembles a block party, as the room greets visitors with Schwinn bicycles, a piragua cart and photos of smiling children.

The exhibition continues an ongoing, intergenerational conversation between the works of Miguel Luciano and Hiram Maristany. The late Hiram Maristany was a founding member as well as the official photographer for the New York City chapter of the Young Lords. The Young Lords, a core subject to this exhibition as well as Maristany’s life work, began in the late 1960s as a radical youth coalition based in Chicago. In the next year, a New York City chapter was born. Thereafter, the Young Lords gained national popularity and the revolutionary spirit spread. The politics of the Young Lords operated on a massive scale, calling for radical political change like Puerto Rican independence from the United States, the end of machismo and adoption of a socialist society. Their politics was also one of care, as members often allocated necessary resources to their communities by running a free breakfast program for local children or conducting hundreds of door-to-door tuberculosis tests during an outbreak in 1970.

One of the Young Lords’ first and most popular displays of public action is documented in Maristany’s “The Garbage Offensive,” a photograph in this exhibition depicting a large pile of trash the Young Lords had swept into the middle of the road and set on fire in a successful attempt to force the New York City Sanitation Department to improve garbage collection in their prominently Latinx neighborhoods.

Claire Kovacs, BU Art Museum curator of collections and exhibitions, said that the inspiration for this exhibition arrived from “Dos Mundos: (Re)Constructing Narratives,” an art exhibition traveling through SUNY campuses in 2020 and 2021.

According to the official website for the traveling exhibition, “’Dos Mundos: (Re)Constructing Narratives’ features 12 artists that center stories at the fringe of public attention: hidden sanctuaries, subcultures, painful identities, far-away homes, spirituality, transcendence, broken promises and all too easily ignored social ecologies.”

Floored by the beauty and depth of this exhibition, Kovacs said she began conversations with Puerto Rican artist Miguel Luciano.

“I was thinking about artists whose work might echo the cultural moment embodied in the original ‘Dos Mundos: Worlds of the Puerto Rican’ (1973) and the efforts toward self-determination in the Nuyorican neighborhood of El Barrio in the late ’60s and early ’70s,” Kovacs wrote in an email.

Luciano, featured artist in this exhibition and mentee of Maristany, currently lives and works in New York City.

The artist’s biography on his website states, “Miguel Luciano is a multimedia visual artist whose work explores themes of history, popular culture and social justice through sculpture, painting and socially engaged public art projects.”

Luciano’s piece “Pimp My Piragua” is undoubtedly the star of this exhibition. The sculpture is a tricycle pushcart that incorporates video screens, LED lights and an accompanying sound system into its design, all of which do not prohibit, but enhance its function as a piragua cart. Piragua is a Puerto Rican shaved ice treat often enjoyed in the summertime and the cultural significance of the piragua cart is further detailed in “Pimp My Piragua’s” descriptive label.

“Piraguas also serve as a way for piragueros to support themselves independently and have long been part of the informal street economy of the city,” the caption reads.

“Pimp my Piragua” stands in front of a larger-than-life print of Hiram Maristany’s “Kids on Bikes,” a photograph depicting its title taken in 1970. Maristany himself described the piece as significant to documenting joy and wonder.

“This [image] is really joyful because it was a big deal for them to be photographed with their bicycles,” Maristany said. “The smallest member of this group, he’s centered in the white shirt. He was like, ‘Hold up, man, wait a minute. Wait, wait.’ He was really proud of his bike, and somehow or another, his bike was better than all the others. It’s a real pleasure to see this because it’s just joyful — [how] joyful they were with their bikes.”

The combination of Maristany’s lifestyle photography and Luciano’s bright sculptures creates a fuller picture of the Latinx experience in New York City. This exhibition displays the love inherent in the action of the Young Lords and the legacy of communal strength they left.

Among the art also lies a section dedicated to general education about the Young Lords. Here you can find a table, chairs and a brief selection of literature on the Young Lords. This corner of the exhibition acts as a literal opportunity to educate oneself on the Young Lords’ history. Further, it also serves as a potential commentary on which historical narratives are presented as important and universal to students in the classroom, and which students must find and learn about on their own.

“Joy, Play and Resistance in the work of Miguel Luciano and Hiram Maristany” differs from any other exhibition by the two artists because it takes joy as not merely tangential to radical political thought, but rather proposes that joy is inherent in the politics and lives of not only the Young Lords, but all young people. The exhibition will be on display until the end of the semester, but Miguel Luciano will be on campus on April 30 to activate his piece “Pimp my Piragua” through performance during Spring Fling. You won’t want to miss it.