Face Each Other, Burn Together
Jordan Corine Cruz
March 25th - April 23rd, 2023 

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Residents of the Bronx have been historically cast aside to accommodate the interests of corporations and politicians who reside outside the borough. The construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway in the 1960s, the plague of arson in the 1970s and 80s, and the recent construction of Mott Haven's luxury high-rises have prompted decades of neglect resulting in the poorest district in the United States, a food desert, and ongoing mental health crises. Since the devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic and the progressive spike in rent prices, the Bronx is facing New York City's latest violent gentrification scheme.

Face Each Other, Burn Together is a site-specific public artwork that responds to the ongoing displacement of BIPOC communities across  New York City and the surrounding boroughs. The work references the language of enforcement used to physically control two of the most isolated and passively neglected areas of New York: Red Hook, Brooklyn, and the South Bronx. The exhibition will take place in both locations, hosting votive wax a-frame police barriers that will melt and eventually break down in their respective sites. The exhibition at haul gallery, near Red Hook, will anchor the work as a public site for tribute and protest as it observes a second barrier melt in the South Bronx.

The haul gallery exhibition of this work is the first iteration of a city-wide public protest.

Jordan Corine Cruz is a queer interdisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, photography, video, and performance. Inspired by the endurance of ancestral belief systems, her works examine nostalgia as a mechanism of comfort, survival, resistance, and liberation through the perspective of diasporic Puerto Rican identity. Cruz received her MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been shown at BronxArtSpace, Haul Gallery, SoMad Gallery, and La Mama Galleria. Cruz was the 2020 recipient of the BRIO award, presented by the Bronx Council on the Arts. In 2019, she organized and hosted a panel talk at SVA focusing on Latinx Women Photographers in collaboration with El Museo del Barrio. She is currently an Adjunct Professor for the Collaborative Arts Department at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Cruz lives and works in The Bronx, New York.