Introducing Barrio Pop
March 27, 2020 / Latinx Art, Media, and Activism University of Texas at Austin Spring 2020
Art history expands within single-artist museum collections, where objects beyond the artwork contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of artistic production. In May 2019, I arrived in Pittsburgh as a fellow at the The Andy Warhol Museum while studying Art History at The University of Texas at Austin College of Fine Arts. My coursework in American art of the 1960s through the 1980s, alongside a class on Queer Art and Activism, shaped how I approached Pop as more than a visual category. I came to understand it as a framework for tracing how materials circulate through convenience-driven capitalist systems shaped by environmental exploitation, labor inequities, and histories of reckoning. This line of inquiry extends into Latine/x contexts, where materials move through domestic spaces, informal economies, and intergenerational knowledge, accumulating meaning over time. During this period, Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art (2018-2019), repositioned Warhol’s work within a renewed contemporary discourse.¹
Access to the museum’s conservation spaces introduced a different mode of looking. Encountering works from Warhol’s Ads series, including his Chanel No. 5 paintings, outside of the gallery foregrounded surface, material, and condition. The perfume bottle, typically encountered through advertising and display, appeared within processes of care and preservation. This shift slowed the act of viewing and redirected attention toward the material life of the object, emphasizing its instability and ongoing transformation.
Warhol’s Time Capsules, comprising hundreds of boxes of accumulated ephemera, further directed my attention to perfume bottles as recurring readymades. Often partially used or displaced from their original contexts, these objects maintain a relationship to scent that is no longer directly accessible. Their presence suggests a form of preservation structured through absence. What remains is not the fragrance itself, but its trace—an index of time, memory, and use embedded within the object.
This attention to scent aligns with the history of perfume as a medium. In The Secret of Chanel No. 5, Coco Chanel describes fragrance as an “invisible accessory.”² In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), Andy Warhol writes that “smell is the closest thing to the past,” positioning scent as a direct pathway to memory.³ His “permanent smell collection” of used perfume bottles extends collecting beyond the visual, suggesting an approach where scent organizes experience across time.
From this research, I developed a series of nine cyanotypes of a late twentieth-century Chanel No. 5 perfume bottle. Cyanotype, as a process rooted in light, water, and chemical reaction, introduces an environmental dimension to image-making. Each print registers variation shaped by exposure, duration, and shifting environmental conditions, foregrounding material experimentation as both method and subject. The resulting deep blue field aligns with Classic Blue, named Pantone’s Color of the Year for 2020, a color associated with stability and depth.⁴ Within the prints, this blue allows the object to move between documentation and abstraction while remaining anchored in process.
This work develops alongside a writing practice that positions scent, material, and analogue process as interconnected areas of study. It informs an approach to immersive program design grounded in slow looking and olfaction, where encounters unfold through material and environmental conditions over time. Through a framework of creative placemaking, this approach activates space through scent and analogue process, shaping site-responsive experiences that connect artistic practice to community, memory, and place.
Donna De Salvo, ed., Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018).
Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Secret of Chanel No. 5: The Intimate History of the World’s Most Famous Perfume (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).
Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975).
Pantone Color Institute, “Pantone Color of the Year 2020: Classic Blue,” 2019.
