Taking Collective Discontent to the Street: Nicolás de Jesús’s Street Banners

Created between 2009 and 2016, his monumental banners in Taking Collective Discontent to the Street confront histories of resistance, violence, and exclusion against Indigenous people across the Americas—communities that have been victims of massacres since colonial times and continue to face discrimination today.

Carried into the streets and displayed in the heart of municipalities, these banners transform protest into public image and collective memory. In The Charco Massacre and the Tryptic for the Disappeared of Ayotzinapa, de Jesús addresses acts of violence perpetrated by paramilitaries against community leaders and students through explicit scenes, portraying fleshy figures and injured bodies rendered with unsettling realism. Other works attest to the artist’s ability to perceive life with wit and irony. In Political Dungheap, politicians are featured as kings. In The Artist’s Funeral, de Jesús envisions his own funeral in a scene dominated by humor. Rather than fleshy figures, these later works recuperate the mocking skeleton characters, called calaveras, which were popularized in Mexico by José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913), whose prints exposed the abuses of political power and social inequality in Mexico on the eve of the Revolution.

As an active community member and witness, de Jesús’s courageous works transform the language of protest into a powerful visual experience that resonates from the street to the Museum’s walls.

Taking Collective Discontent to the Street: Nicolás de Jesús’s Street Banners is organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY, and curated by Patrice Giasson, the Alex Gordon Curator for the Art of the Americas. Generous support for this exhibition is provided by the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art.