Adal Maldonado

Adál (born Adal Maldonado, 1948) is a Puerto Rican artist who forms part of the Nuyorican cultural movement in New York City.

Born in Utuado, Puerto Rico, Adal Maldonado relocated to New York City at the age of seventeen. Baptized as Adál by photographer Lisette Model, he was trained as a photographer and master printer at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1970s. Adál is the co-founder and co-director - with Alex Coleman - of Foto Gallery in SoHo, New York City, 1975; an experimental gallery solely devoted to photography and photo-derived works as a fine-arts medium.

As have many other photographers of his generation - most notably Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Lucas Samaras - and due to his complex view of double identity, Adál has systematically explored identity issues to their ultimate consequences. From suggestive, “surreal” photographic collages in the early 1970s, to the ironic concreteness of his Auto-Portraits series, and, finally, to the creation of an ethereal, ubiquitous country where he and his Out of Focus Nuyoricans colleagues live, Adál has collapsed self-portraiture’s allegedly self-referential quality. Indeed, a great deal of his work’s satiric trademark arises from the constant mockery of the possibility of ever achieving an ultimate, definitive picture of one’s self.

By exposing the absurdity behind the search for ultimate reference to selfhood in art, Adál challenges the notion of literalness. His relentless punning on literal meanings has become the most privileged artistic principle in his work, and has enabled him to address perhaps the most slippery characteristic of his own biography: his double cultural allegiance as a Nuyorican. Through this mechanism, he has been able to successfully incorporate the potentially satiric quality of the Spanglish Language Sandwich and bilingual code-switching into his self-portraiture without making it strenuously conceptual and to tackle the scandals of the day with theatrical irony.

...
Wikipedia