Chandelier,+El

Date: 1988
 * [[image:https://s3.amazonaws.com/saam.media/files/styles/x_large/s3/images/1995/1995.40_1a.jpg?itok=d-UktJgs width="260" height="327" link="@https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/el-chandelier-34558"]] || Title: **El Chandelier**

Artist: **Pepón Osorio** Born: San Juan, Puerto Rico 1955

Medium: functional metal and glass chandelier with plastic toys and figurines, glass crystals, and other objects Dimensions: 60 7/8 x 42 in. (154.6 x 106.7 cm) diam. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Smithsonian Latino Initiatives Pool and the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program

Accession: 1995.40 || Osorio created //El Chandelier// for a performance piece that explored the life of a Puerto Rican woman living in New York. The fixture is encrusted with doll babies, bowling pins, palm trees, plastic animals, and sculptures of saints—the cheap, brightly colored decorations called chucherías that appear in "Nuyorican" households.
 * Exhibition Label: **

//El Chandelier// is dazzling and light-hearted, but the illusion of abundance masks the poverty of the barrio. Osorio acknowledges that most people won't understand the larger message, for he is an outsider himself, raised in a middle-class Puerto Rican family. He saw this kind of rascuache—making something wonderful out of nothing— in the apartments he visited as a social worker. Osorio speaks of his admiration for barrio culture as well as his frustration with its limitations. //El Chandelier//, with its mixed Spanish and English title, suggests the lives of people who find themselves trapped between two cultures, no longer at home in either one and making a feast for the eye as a compensation.

The reason that there are so many plastic spiders on this artwork may be because the word for spider in some Spanish speaking countries is araña, which also means chandelier.
 * Additional Information: **

Artist Fact Sheet - Osorio  Osorio Bulletin <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;"> <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">
 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">Resources: **

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14.3px;">Artist Biography <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14.3px;">SAAM Collections Page
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