Hartford, CT – Real Art Ways, one of the country's seminal alternative arts spaces, recently received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to present a major exhibition of contemporary Puerto Rican art. The exhibition, NONE OF THE ABOVE: CONTEMPORARY WORK BY PUERTO RICAN ARTISTS, will open in May 2004.

More information on the exhibition will be forthcoming in the following months.

Along with Steven Holmes, Director of Visual Arts and Public Programming at Real Art Ways, the exhibition will be coordinated with two guest curators: Deborah Cullen, Curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York City, and Silvia Karman Cubiñá, an indepent curator.

The exhibition will feature innovative contemporary work from Puerto Rican artists in a context that will serve to engage and inform both a national and local audience.

The exhibition will focus on the resurgence of conceptualism by a new, younger generation of Puerto Rican artists.

Real Art Ways has longstanding relationshiops with the Spanish speaking communities of the Greater Hartford area. In addition to multiple presentations of concerts, performance, spoken word and films, all accompanied by particular efforts to engage and collaborate with community organizations, Real Art Ways in 1994 commissioned and produced Pepón Osorio's seminal "En la Barbería no se Llora" ("No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop") in the heart of Hartford's Puerto Rican neighborhood.

The visual arts exhibition will also coincide with a series of live arts and cinema programming at Real Art Ways in the spring and summer of 2004.

NONE OF THE ABOVE will help to expand a critical framework for understanding a new generation of Puerto Rican artists whose work is not easily absorbed into a history of Puerto Rican art dominated by location, aesthetics, themes or politics.