Born in1945 in East Harlem to parents who had migrated from Puerto Rico to New York, Maristany was a lifelong resident of El Barrio. In addition to his work with the Young Lords, Maristany was also part of the community that helped fellow artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz found El Museo del Barrio in 1969. Maristany helped formulate the institution’s visual language in its early years, providing his photographs for the museum’s bilingual publication Quimbamba. He later served as the institution’s director from 1974 to 1977. As director, he worked to mount multiracial exhibitions of artists as a way of coalition-building.

Maristany had no formal training in photography when he took up the medium as a way to offer other images of Puerto Ricans than the ones he was seeing, and he once described his process of creating these images as “trial and error.”

But more than anything, his images were a way of making sure that the history of his community was being captured and told by someone from that community. “There are people that I know that when they come here and they see this, they will feel included in the history of America. That’s something that so many people take for granted. Truly, my work is a reflection of a love affair that I’ve had with my community. One day hopefully I will give some inspiration to some young people or an evolving artist to know their community, to preserve their community, and not allow someone else to do it for them. We have to take responsibility and title to our own history. It’s no accident that a lot of the images are of 111th.That’s the street that I was born and raised on,” The artist said in a video interview with the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2018.

Mr. Maristany was the official photographer of the Young Lords One of the most important actions that Maristany documented was a 1969 protest known as the Garbage Offensive. At the time, garbage collection in El Barrio was systematically neglected by the city’s Sanitation Department, with refuse staying on sidewalks in the neighborhood for weeks at a time. The Young Lords decided that a more drastic action needed to be taken to underscore the severity of the crisis that the community was facing. One summer day, they took all the trash and dumped it in major intersection of 111th Street and Third Avenue—and then set it on fire. Maristany captured the group’s occupation of the First Spanish United Methodist Church in East Harlem, which they renamed “The People’s Church” and used as their headquarters and a community center and the funeral of fellow Young Lords member Julio Roldan, who died in police custody in 1970. “

“Hiram’s images are a powerful archive of a community that, when photographed by Hiriam in the 1960s and 1970s, was at the peak of its photographic racialization and marginalization,” scholar Arlene Dávila wrote in an email. “He provided a corrective visual response representing El Barrio from the perspective of its residents: filled with love, pride, and informed by the ethos of struggle and resilience that enveloped social movements of the times.”

Maristany’s photographs document the crucial history of East Harlem as a political and cultural paradigm of New York City,” said Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, who curated the exhibition “¡PRESENTE! The Young Lords in New York” at El Museo del Barrio in 2015, which included his work.

In partnership with Miguel Luciano, a friend and mentee of organized “Mapping Resistance: The Young Lords in El Barrio.” For that show, Maristany’s images were blown up and installed on the streets where they were originally shot, and Miguel Luciano organized walking tours that summer to celebrate the neighborhood’s activist history and to prevent against its erasure and displacement.

Most recently, his images were purchased by film director, George Lucas and was appointed as the lead for Hunter College Center for Puerto Rican Studies photography program.

As with many artist of color of his generation, wider recognition for Maristany came later in life. His inclusion in Greater New York, which opened last October, marks the first time his work was curated into a major group exhibition at a mainstream New York institution.

Maristany’s work was featured in the 2018 show “Down These Mean Streets: Community and Place in Urban Photography,” which was organized by E. Carmen Ramos for SAAM and which later traveled to El Museo. In the lead-up to the latter exhibition, SAAM acquired 12 works by the artist in 2016. El Museo acquired a suite of five images by him in 2019.

In an email, Ruba Katrib, a co-curator of the current Greater New York exhibition, said that Maristany “was always giving back to his community in East Harlem through his work as a Young Lord and as a mentor to young people, and also as a photographer who understood the importance of self-representation and the radical power of images to bring about greater understanding and even change.”

Dávila argued that Maristany intentionally kept his images out of museums like MoMA PS1 for so long. “Hiram knew that images are political, and he was very intentional in the circulation and representation of his images—careful about whom he talked to, to the point of keeping a lot of his record ‘sequestered’ for years because he did not trust the ability of museums and curators to treat his work and subjects with respect,” she said

“‘Dignidad over fame’ was his motto, and I am just thankful that he lived to see his work and subjects treated with respect and Dignidad.”

Please help us honor him with naming his childhood home of 111th and Madsion after him. 

 

 

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