NEW YORK, NY.- El Museo del Barrio announces an exhibition in tribute to Puerto Rican–born fashion illustrator and artist Antonio Lopez (1943–1987)— better known as “Antonio”—and his prolific three-decade career on the New York fashion scene. The exhibition draws new attention to the importance of his working relationship with his life-long business partner, Juan Ramos, and the impact they had on integrating models of color into a prominent role in the world of high fashion for the first time. The exhibition opened on June 14 and will remain on view through November 26, 2016.

Antonio Lopez: Future Funk Fashion hasl been divided into the following core themes and understudied aspects of the artist’s work: the body (with subthemes on the fractured body and the body of color), music, the street, and the influence of Afrofuturism on his work. Among the most important of these themes is the power of New York street culture, which includes graffiti, music, politics, and dance, and how these influences figured into Antonio’s work. During his lifetime Lopez's colorful and flamboyant illustrations appeared prominently in Vogue, Elle, Vanity, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times, Interview and Women’s Wear Daily, drawing fresh attention to race, gender and body images within the world of high fashion.

El Museo’s exhibition brings together a unique collection of over 400 works, including Lopez’s prolific drawings, Instamatic photographs, archival photographs, his clothing and shoe designs; making this the most comprehensive exhibition on the artist to date. Unique among Lopez’s exhibitions, El Museo’s focuses on how Lopez and Ramos’ work affected the canon of beauty in the 1970s and into the 1980s. Thematic sections within the exhibition have been built around his illustrations, his relationships with particular models (Grace Jones, Pat Cleveland, Jessica Lange, Jerry Hall, aka “Antonio’s Girls”), his shoe and jewelry designs, and images of people he came to know and love from the streets of New York City.

The show’s co-curators are Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, Curator at El Museo del Barrio, and Amelia Malagamba-Ansótegui, a scholar from Arizona State University and University of Texas San Antonio. Dr. Malagamba’s 2003 essay on Antonio Lopez for the Smithsonian Latino Center at the Smithsonian Institution continues to be a key text for its analysis of Lopez’s attention to race, gender and the body.

The selection of works are on loan from the Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos, directed by Paul Caranicas, in addition to works borrowed from various private collections in New York City, including the collection of designer Narciso Rodriguez.

Antonio Lopez was born in Utuado, Puerto Rico on February 11, 1943. His family lived in East Harlem in New York City when Antonio was seven, where he attended P.S. 72 on East 104th Street, two blocks from where El Museo now stands. To keep her son off the streets, Lopez’s mother, a seamstress, would ask him to draw flowers for her embroideries. He also helped his father, a mannequin maker, to apply make-up and stitch wigs onto the figures. At the age of twelve, Lopez earned a scholarship to the prestigious Traphagen School of Fashion, which provided Saturday programming for children. From there he went on to attend the High School of Art and Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Antonio rose to prominence illustrating fashions for Women’s Wear Daily and The New York Times. He eventually became a freelance artist for many of the top fashion publications. He collaborated with the noted designer Charles James, creating an illustrated inventory of James’ fashion designs (now in the collection of the Chicago History Museum). He later moved to Paris with his friend and business partner, Juan Ramos, where they both worked with Karl Lagerfeld and many other designers.

Through his work, Antonio made great strides in exploring and representing the gendered, ethnic or racialized body within the world of high fashion. His imagery helped develop a new canon of beauty throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He died of complications related to AIDS on March 17, 1987 at the age of 44.