Issue 4 is here.
For years New York has been the most expensive, most unequal, most surveilled classroom in America. And yet the people teaching, learning, and organizing inside it keep imagining something.
NY 2044 Issue 4 on education is reported from their imaginations.
Join us for the launch, live readings, a sonic futurescape, and free copies of the paper. Come hear the futures New Yorkers are already writing.
📅 Thursday, May 21
🕕 6 – 9 PM
📍 Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, Lower East Side
RSVP: /ny2044launch
#newyork2044 #nycevent #nyceducation #speculativefutures #freenycevents
A preview of, and some history behind @nakazawastudio AR monument and sculpture “Dome Cartographies”
This monument extends on Nakazawa’s sculpture of the same name, from her recent installation at Socrates Sculpture Park. This monument is a dome that functions as a space for storytelling, gathering, and diasporic connection in the World’s Borough of Queens.
The sculptural dome takes its inspiration from the work of CHARAS, an education-focused group of former Puerto Rican gang members-turned-activists who challenged notions of who New York City was built for. In the 70s, they collaborated with architect Buckminster Fuller to create Geodesic domes as gathering spaces in the abandoned areas of the Lower East Side.
Nakazawa’s reinterpretation of the domes are now transported to Jackson Heights, a neighborhood where many of New York’s Latinx populations (Ecuadorian, Colombian, and more!) have made their homes. But this neighborhood is not just a core Latinx neighborhood, but is also a place where different diasporas meet and fuse. Thus, the dome serves as a counter-map to how we see the city. Instead of street names and numbers, we see stories and perseverance.
Join us at The World’s Borough Bookshop in Queens to celebrate the monument launch with music, artist conversations, walking tours, ‘zines, and more!
🎉 Dome Cartographies Monument Launch Event
📅 5–7 PM
📍The World’s Borough Bookshop
🔗 Link in bio to RSVP
The ABC No Rio Visual Arts Collective introduces our next art exhibition: 'Art-Work: Balance'.
Exploring the often invisible tension between creative practice and the jobs artists take on to support their practice, the exhibition reveals how labor outside the studio—whether inspiring, exhausting, or intrusive—shapes the artist's identity, process, and output. Featuring artwork across a variety of mediums, the works do not directly depict these jobs but instead respond to the lived reality of navigating survival and self-expression. The audience is invited to consider the cost, resilience, and ingenuity behind sustaining an artistic life.
Opens May 29th 6-9pm
Closes: July 12th
@ The Clemente 4th Floor Gallery (107 Suffolk Street, 4th floor)
Mark your calendar!
Exhibiting artists include:
Yasmeen Abdallah
Noel Batista
Sabra Booth
Lionel Carre
Barrie Cline
BerdsCarnival (Maraya Lopez)
Jeff Elliott
Maura Falfán
Lambert Fernando
Christina Freeman
Dennis Kaiser
Armia Malak Khalil
Clarence Klingebell
Emilie Lemakis
Chad Lemke
NEXN GHST
Arthur Polendo
Paolo Raymundo (ParadoxVestedRelics)
Sophie Sanders
Scott Seaboldt
Hector Serna
Laura Stoland
Eileen Travell
Paul Vance
Laura Wile
Workers Art Coalition
Thomas Zimmerman
#abcnorio #art #exhibition
#OnThisDay, May 7, 1998, NBC aired the Seinfeld episode titled "The Puerto Rican Day," which sparked major controversy and led to protests outside NBC's Rockefeller Center in NYC.
The episode included a scene where the Puerto Rican flag is accidentally burned and stomped on, and characters make comments that many felt disrespected the Puerto Rican community. Manuel Mirabal, then President of the National Puerto Rican Coalition, stated, “It is unacceptable that the Puerto Rican flag be used by Seinfeld as a stage prop under any circumstances.”
After public outcry from the Puerto Rican community, NBC apologized and took the episode out of syndication. However, the episode reappeared in full in 2023 on Netflix.
Given the fraught history in the Puerto Rican community with ongoing colonialism, La Ley de la Mordaza (the Gag law), and its symbol of resistance, this moment became one of many examples of how media portrayals can impact communities and why cultural respect and understanding in entertainment matters.
Comment 📍and we’ll send you the link to read more on this topic and explore other key historical events in New York City in Nueva York Chronicles
📸 Carlos Ortiz. Carlos Ortiz Collection. Puerto Rican Protest against NBC and Jerry Seinfeld. CENTRO Library & Archives, Hunter College, CUNY.
We had a wonderful opening ceremony for LESPI's outdoor photography exhibit, "Brick and Stone: Landmarking our Lower East Side Heritage" on Saturday at The Clemente Center. Speakers included Council Member Christopher Marte, Assemblymember Grace Lee, photographer Ari Burling, and representatives from LESPI, The Clemente, and Fourth Arts Block.
People stopped by to chat and sign our petition for landmarking, voted for their favorite potential landmarks in a special poll, and received LESPI gift bags, courtesy of Economy Candy, just for attending (like the Oscars!). If you missed Saturday's event, you can still catch the exhibit at the corner of Suffolk and Rivington Streets until June 30.
YOU’RE INVITED
🎉 Monument Launch Party
🗓️ Friday May 29
📍The World’s Borough Bookshop
The Clemente and Kinfolk Tech are excited to announce the Jackson Heights, Queens edition of Historias in Motion, featuring “Dome Cartographies,” a new AR monument by artist Natalia Nakazawa paired with historical contributions from the Queens Memory Project. This signature series engages audiences with historically important Latinx neighborhoods around New York City, building community memory through artist-storyteller pairings, walking tours, limited-edition zines, and commissioned AR monuments that offer new possibilities for memorialization.
Join us at 5 pm on Friday, May 29, at the World’s Borough Bookshop to celebrate the monument launch music, artist conversations, walking tours, ‘zines, and more!
Link in bio to RSVP
#TheClemente is proud to announce Jesús Hilario-Reyes ( @morenxx_x ) and Tichacoco ( @tichacoco ) as our inaugural 2026-27 Van Lier Fellows, a new program launched with support from the New York Community Trust. The fellowship is designed to provide deep support to experimental and community-engaged support to artists under thirty at pivotal moments in their careers.
The fellows will be in residence at The Clemente for 18 months, and each will receive a $20,000 award and additional production support toward a duo show at the conclusion of the fellowship. Fellows will also have opportunities to contribute to the Historias initiative and the Nueva York Chronicles!
OHMA Presents: Presence April 29 – May 9 | NYC
In a moment that feels chaotic, disconnected, and increasingly digital, it is notable that OHMA students in our Curating Oral Histories class this year all chose to create experiences that happen in person and invite embodied connection and slow reflection. Presence.
Part of the ethical practice of oral history is reciprocity, and we are also thinking of presents in the sense of gifts. Each student project is carefully designed to offer something—from literal gift bags to free theater to more ephemeral insights—to those who attend and share their presence with us.
From oral histories of embodied healing paired with somatic workshops, to conversations over crafts and food, to a late-night deli-speakeasy of artists' night jobs, to visual art on trauma therapies, and explorations of internationalism and coming of age in Nigeria—these projects unfold across New York City.
We invite you to be present with us.
OHMA Presents: Presence is co-sponsored by @theclemente
🔗 More information in the link in our bio
This is the last week to see Last Request at @teatrolatea , the final play written by Pedro Pietri.
Co-produced by #TheClemente and @felt_inc , this production is part of our mission in #Historias to rescue lost narratives in Latinx history.
Pietri's work reminds us that Latinx NYC sounds is community, a part of the streetscape, and has its own poetry. You don't want to miss this. Link in bio!
Coming soon… #DominoTableTalks Episode 4, El Barrio editon 👀
Thank you to the iconic @exoticfragrancesny for hosting us.
Keep an eye out on Historias.NYC and our YouTube for the full episode airing in June
Brick and Stone: Landmarking our Lower East Side Heritage invites you to read the LES through what still stands: health facilities, settlement houses, financial and religious institutions, firehouses, and schools that continue to hold the neighborhood’s memory in its architecture. This outdoor banner exhibition invites us to look again at the historic buildings that have carried the neighborhood’s memory across generations.
Presented by @nyc_lespi and @theclemente , this exhibition is part of Lower East Side History Month @the_peoples_les , the annual May celebration organized by @_fabnyc , in which more than 60 neighborhood organizations, businesses, and residents host public events, exhibits, tours, and other opportunities to engage the area’s history.
LESPI is working to secure NYC landmark designation for some of the buildings featured at this exhibition, helping ensure that they remain tangible links to the community’s rich past and part of its vibrant future.
Join us for the outdoor opening ceremony on Suffolk Street, outside The Clemente, on May 2 from 2–5 PM. The exhibition is on view from May 1 through June 30.
#LowerEastSide #TheClemente #LESPI #LESmonth #LESHistorymonth
A small cameo, but a big reminder.
Thank you @perfectunion for catching a glimpse of our Historias in Motion monument at @lamarquetanyc in this week’s major news moment.
As Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced plans for city-run groceries at La Marqueta, one of New York’s most storied public markets, we were reminded that public markets have long been more than retail sites. They are spaces of labor, migration, affordability, and diasporic foodways.
Our Nueva York Chronicles (NY.C.) entry on this history argues that models like this are not a break from the past, but a return to an older civic idea. Public markets are not just places to shop. They are engines of labor, community, cultural memory, and diasporic foodways.
Long before this week’s headlines, La Marqueta stood as proof that food infrastructure can also be civic infrastructure, where affordability, small business life, migration history, and cultural belonging converge.
If this proposal moves forward with care, it may show that the future New York needs is not entirely new. Sometimes it looks like a city remembering what public goods were always meant to do.
Read our NY.C. topic entry, NYC Public Markets as Engines of Labor, Community, and Diasporic Foodways.
And explore our Historias in Motion public monument hosted at La Marqueta, Cigar Workers’ University, a collaboration between artist @mollycrabapple and historian Monxo López.
See how New York’s past can help us imagine its public future.
#historiasinmotion #nuevayorkchronicles #lamarqueta #eastharlem #elbarrio
