The People’s Pulpit: An Evening with Miguel Luciano and Willie Perdomo 

Floor 3, Theater

Join artist Miguel Luciano and poet Willie Perdomo to activate Luciano’s sculpture The People’s Pulpit (2022) and celebrate the history and legacy of the Young Lords and Nuyorican photography, art and activism.  

Currently on view in Shifting Landscapes, The People's Pulpit consists of a pulpit salvaged from the First Spanish Methodist Church in East Harlem, also known as The People's Church. The Young Lords, a revolutionary group of Puerto Rican activists, famously took over the church in 1969–1970 and renamed it. At The People's Church, they hosted free breakfast programs, clothing drives, health services, and other community programs.  

To create The People’s Pulpit, Luciano installed a speaker box in the repurposed pulpit to amplify the voices of this history in the form of a vintage recording of Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri (1944–2004) reciting his famed poem “Puerto Rican Obituary” during The Young Lords’ takeover of the church. Pietri, also known as “El Reverendo,” became one of the greatest poets of his generation, and was a central figure of the Nuyorican Arts movement. 

For this event, the sculpture returns to its original function. Luciano has invited Perdomo to read a new work that responds to the history embodied in The People’s Pulpit, which will be installed in the Whitney’s Hess Theater in dialogue with photographs by Hiram Maristany (1945–2022), who documented the events at The People’s Church and the activities of The Young Lords. Perdomo’s reading will be followed by a conversation between the two artists and Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator. 
 

This program is presented in partnership with the Chancellor’s Office of the City University of New York (CUNY). 

The People's Pulpit will be installed in the Theater on Floor 3 on Friday, December 5 and visitors are invited to experience it in this unique situation throughout the day.

Miguel Luciano is a multimedia visual artist whose work explores themes of history, popular culture, and social justice through sculpture, painting, and socially engaged public art projects. His work has been exhibited widely and he is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Mellon Foundation's Latinx Artist Fellowship (2021), The Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award, and Socially Engaged Art Fellowship from A Blade of Grass. His work is featured in the permanent collections of The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The National Portrait Gallery, The National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Brooklyn Museum, El Museo del Barrio, and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. Luciano is currently a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts and Yale University School of Art. 
  
Willie Perdomo is the author of Smoking Lovely: The Remix, The Crazy Bunch, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime. Winner of the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, the PEN Open Book Award, the New York City Book Award in Poetry, and the Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, Perdomo was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award. He co-edited the anthology, LatiNext, and was recently awarded a Letras Boricuas 2024 Fellowship. He teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy and was appointed Poet of New York State (2021-2023).