El Museo del Barrio to host first major survey of photographer Sophie Rivera
Sophie Rivera, Untitled, mid-1980s. Color photograph. Estate of Martin Hurwitz.
NEW YORK, NY.—
El Museo del Barrio announces Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures, the first museum survey dedicated to the groundbreaking photographer Sophie Rivera (1938–2021). Opening April 23, 2026, the exhibition will offer a long-overdue reevaluation of Rivera’s contributions to photography and Nuyorican visual culture. Hosted at El Museo del Barrio, Double Exposures also honors the artist’s longstanding connection with our institution, where she organized exhibitions and held her first solo exhibition during the 1980s. An accompanying publication co-published by El Museo del Barrio and Aperture will mark the occasion, serving as the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to the artist and featuring more than 125 plates, reproductions of Rivera's own writings, as well as newly commissioned scholarship.
Double Exposures will feature Rivera’s portraits, documentary images, experimental self-portraits, and photographs of the New York City subway system, including those capturing the late-1970s graffiti scene. Double Exposures brings together vintage prints and ephemera from the artist’s archive, including material that has never been publicly presented.
“Sophie Rivera’s artistic journey is deeply intertwined with the history of El Museo del Barrio,” said Patrick Charpenel, Executive Director of El Museo del Barrio. “Hosted at El Museo, Double Exposures pays tribute to Rivera’s longstanding connection with our institution, where she organized exhibitions and presented her first solo show in the 1980s. In partnership with Aperture, we are honored to celebrate Rivera’s enduring legacy and to share her powerful vision with new audiences—continuing the dialogues that have long defined our community.”
The title Double Exposures references both Rivera’s use of the referenced photographic technique—layering multiple images within a single frame—and the artist’s exploration of multiplicity and identity. Through this lens, Rivera’s photographs embody the intersectional perspective central to her work as a Puerto Rican woman artist in New York during the 1970s-1990s, whose images both contest and expand established histories of portraiture and representation.
“Within Latine art circles, Rivera is revered for her striking Latino Portraits. We are thrilled to present these images alongside lesser-known works from her expansive ouevre, including her provocative self-portraits, gleeful Halloween images, and gritty New York landscapes,” said the exhibition’s curator, Susanna V. Temkin, Interim Chief Curator, El Museo del Barrio. “In contextualizing the full breadth of Rivera’s career, Double Exposures aims to situate Rivera's legacy within wider photographic and cultural contexts of post-war New York.”
As Latine cultural production continues to shape the American experience, Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures marks an institutional milestone for El Museo del Barrio—revisiting essential episodes from New York’s Nuyorican history and celebrating an artist whose work powerfully underscores the central place of Puerto Rican and Latine voices in the story of American art.
Sophie Rivera (1938–2021) was a pioneering photographer whose work emerged in the 1970s amid a generation of artists challenging the misrepresentation of Latines in American media, art, and culture. As one of the few women photographers associated with En Foco, the Bronx-based photography collective established in the context of the Nuyorican Movement, Rivera played a critical role in advancing the collective’s mission of self-representation. Her celebrated Latino Portrait series celebrates everyday Puerto Ricans and were later exhibited at large scale in the New York City subway system—bringing, in Rivera’s words, “portraits of people like themselves” to the public.
Deeply engaged with her community and committed to the politics of visibility, Rivera’s practice blended formal experimentation with social consciousness. Her work continues to resonate as a powerful reflection of identity, resilience, and belonging in the urban landscape.
