Pepón Osorio

Pepón Osorio (born 1955 in Santurce, San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a Puerto Rican multidisciplinary artist known for large-scale, immersive installations that bring together sculpture, video, found objects, performance, and community-based practices. After moving from Puerto Rico to the South Bronx in 1975, Osorio studied sociology at Herbert H. Lehman College and later earned an MA in sociology from Columbia University in 1985. Before working as an artist full-time, he was a social worker in New York, including in a child-abuse prevention unit serving primarily Latino communities—an experience that profoundly shaped his collaborative approach to artmaking. He currently lives and works between Philadelphia and San Juan and is Associate Professor Emeritus at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture.  Osorio is recognized for densely layered environments that transform familiar spaces—including homes, barbershops, bedrooms, classrooms, and institutional settings—into sites for examining social and political realities. Often incorporating everyday objects, decorative materials, photographs, video, furniture, religious imagery, and what he has described through the language of chucherías, his installations draw upon Puerto Rican and Nuyorican visual culture while challenging conventional distinctions between fine art, popular aesthetics, and domestic decoration. Works such as El Chandelier (1988), Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?) (1993), No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop (1994), and Badge of Honor (1995) address migration, racial and class hierarchies, masculinity, family, incarceration, and the ways private life intersects with larger social systems.  Community engagement is fundamental to Osorio’s methodology. Many of his projects emerge through extended conversations and collaborations with the people whose experiences inform the work, and he has frequently presented installations within neighborhoods, storefronts, schools, and other community spaces before moving them into museums. This process positions exhibition-making as a form of social exchange and allows the meaning of a work to shift as it moves between community and institutional contexts. Over more than three decades, his projects have addressed structural inequalities involving education, health care, incarceration, race, gender, class, and cultural representation, particularly as they affect Latinx and working-class communities in the United States.  Osorio has received some of the most significant honors in contemporary American art, including a MacArthur Fellowship, an Alpert Award in the Arts, the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the College Art Association’s Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement. His 2023 New Museum exhibition, My Beating Heart/Mi corazón latiente, was described by the museum as his most comprehensive exhibition to date, bringing together landmark installations from the 1990s through his contemporary practice. In 2024, his installation Convalescence, developed from conversations about illness and health-care inequity, was presented by Philadelphia Contemporary and Thomas Jefferson University. His work is also included in MASP’s current 2026–27 exhibition Latin American Histories in São Paulo.