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For creative entrepreneur Tara Sherry-Torres, Pittsburgh was the perfect place to situate Café Con Leche — an art project drawing on her Latino roots.
That might seem counterintuitive. After all, Pittsburgh’s Latino community is among the smallest of any major U.S. city.
“Diversity [here] is pretty passive,” says Sherry-Torres, a Brooklyn native who moved here in 2008 to complete her master’s degree in social work at the University of Pittsburgh.
But the city has a flourishing arts community, and Sherry-Torres saw room to grow. Her finesse for community organizing — and her passion for her Puerto Rican heritage — led her to establish Café Con Leche (“coffee with milk”), a pop-up initiative that celebrates Latino culture.
Last year, she extended its scope to include Latinos worldwide when she received a Heinz Endowments Small Arts Initiative Grant to fund a Latino artist residency. Garfield’s Most Wanted Fine Art Gallery hosts the residency, with new artists monthly through August. The current guests are Nicole Oliveri and Greg Garay.
Oliveri, a Puerto Rican painter recently relocated to Delmont, infuses love of her heritage into her artwork, a whirlwind of color set against equally rich political subtexts.
“The news loves to portray the violence in Puerto Rico,” she says. “But I want to show it’s actually beautiful.”
Oliveri, 25, describes military tanks left on the Puerto Rican coast that the community has reclaimed with graffiti. In “Surreal perspective of the island’s beauty,” she depicts a tree’s roots stretching toward a similar tank beneath a beacon of light.
Greg Garay, a Panamanian-American from Brooklyn, uses his artwork to portray mood, hinging on the theme of memory. His style borrows from illustration, cartooning and digital painting.
The residency highlights Garay’s double alienation as a black man and a Latino.
“I’m usually just identified as black,” he says. “This brings a lot to that diaspora, to show just how buried Latinos are.”
“What’s interesting about being Latino in Pittsburgh is that I’m not [considered] Latino. It’s like invisibility,” he says.
Artists like Oliveri and Garay seek to widen creative opportunities for Latinos in Pittsburgh.
Sherry-Torres, whose work has been recognized with a Pittsburgh Magazine “40 Under 40” designation, says more is to come. “Latinos in the creative space are really on fire right now,” she says.
This article appears in Apr 6-12, 2016.
yes, PIttsburgh diversity when it comes to Latinos and a lot of ethnics groups of color is small for as big as Pittsburgh is ,GO FIGURE!? After being sent here from the gulfcoast, i couldn’t believe that is was like this, but i think this is why so many people here can be a little bit sterile or not use to people of color in volumes unless there black, and that doesn’t steam to well here either. Pittsburgh is like the last frontier for a lot of things and that includes race too.
It’s true that Latinos are not recognized in Pittsburgh, unless you are all being mistaken as Mexican. There is nothing wrong with celebrating the Mexican culture but there are many other latino cultures to be celebrated also. People here seem to find it so easy to group us all in the same bowl, not realizing the depth of the Latino cultures. Many are learning but there is a long way to go. Pittsburgh needs to open their minds to the fact that, just as their parents celebrated their culture, so do Latinos with great pride.