Where Art and Social Change Converge
Isabel and Julio Nazario Interview: "Art making is a catalyst for human beings to understand themselves and the world around them"
by Sehwheat Manna, staff writer
“Manifesting Beloved Community” sees its first juror team for its 2025 exhibit. Isabel and Julio Nazario are New York artists who retired from their careers in academia. In 2021, they opened the West Strand Gallery in Kingston, NY.
After earning her MFA from Queens College, CUNY, Isabel Nazario taught courses in art history and Caribbean studies at her alma mater. She parlayed her skills into museum education and arts management, kickstarting a community gallery that highlighted the artists of color that were excluded from the mainstream. The gallery was so successful that it was granted funding by the New York State Council of the Arts. It was here that Isabel served as an associate analyst, and where she refined the skills that led her to Rutgers University with the mission of launching the Center of Latino Arts and Culture. She served as AVP with the university until retiring to the Hudson Valley.
Isabel’s Nuyorican upbringing informs both her artistic work and community engagement. The painter immigrated from Puerto Rico to New York as a child, and, among other hardships, witnessed the ways that race and income were levied against people looking for housing. This continued throughout her adulthood and is a recurring topic of discussion throughout our interview.
Julio Nazario also earned his MFA from Queens College after completing a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy. The photographer and New York native has been an educator for many years, first as adjunct professor at LaGuardia Community College, then as an instructor of photography at the International Center of Photography. He returned to school in the late nineties, this time at Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts. With his second MFA, he was hired as Assistant Dean for Outreach, Special Initiatives and Assessment at Rutgers. It was in this role that Julio served until his retirement with his wife.
Julio is also a veteran, having been awarded the Purple Heart for his service in the Vietnam War. The resulting PTSD continues to inform his work, as well as the hostility he experienced for both his race and his being drafted into a war that the American public fiercely opposed. He spoke on this experience and its relationship to the arts in our interview.
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What did you both know about the Manifesting Beloved Community exhibition project prior to serving as jurors?
…we looked back at Martin Luther King’s words and his meaning of this phrase. In his 1957 speech “Birth of a New Nation”, King said that “the aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community. He also said “it is a society where conflict exists but is resolved peacefully, without hostility nor violence. The end is reconciliation. He said racism, bigotry, and prejudice would be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood.”
What was it like having a partner in the meditative process of judging?
We enjoy working together but we also respect each other’s perspective, so we each reviewed the works separately. We decided that at first review we would indicate which ones we each did not want to include in the show. Then, we compared to see if we selected the same works. Next, we proceeded to review all the works together to see if the images related to the theme “Manifesting Beloved Community” (including the ones we had marked as a no). We did this because it gave us a second opportunity to see if we were correct in not including them. Next step, we reviewed all of the images together noting what we liked about each image. That is when we considered the use of medium, the process for creating the piece on paper or canvas, the size of the work and the innovative way of depicting the topic.
Isabel, in an interview with Hudson Valley One, you comment on your experience as AVP of Rutgers’ Center of Latino Arts and Culture (paraphrased):
Improving integration of the arts and community requires having a voice from the community; there is often a discrepancy between what the people need and what institutional leaders think the people need.
How do you see this 2025 exhibit, and Arts Against Racism at large, navigate this balance?
Throughout the years of working in academia, I learned that, more often than not, institutions are power structures that are disconnected from the everyday lived experience of the populations surrounding the institution. For me, the way you bridge the gap between institutions and the community is through community engagement which includes art making. The voice of the community is manifested in the work that is created. It’s their images that inform us of their state of mind, their concerns, their understanding of life, etc. In presenting their images, recording them, making a record of their imaginings, their emotions and their interpretations we validate their out as shaped by them.
Julio: Arts Against Racism, when it started, had the goal of conveying to various communities the issue of racism and encouraging artists from those represented communities to present images that convey the issue of racism—
Isabel: —to tackle them. To get others in the community to question what is really happening to us as people of color in the various communities that we’re in. The combination of people hauling trash and people in academia. For us, when this project first started, we were with Rhinold at the beginning. I wish that the discussion had been recorded because it was really rich in the different perspectives that we had on how we’re all dealing with oppressive environments and the oppressive environments were at different levels. So the people hauling trash and postal worker…had a very different perspective than the people who were part of [academia].
Julio: The thing is that Art Against Racism actually was built on movements that were in the 50’s and 60’s and 70’s, of communities that began to see themselves and represent themselves vis à vis photography, vis à vis printmaking, vis à vis painting, and that was a way of asserting presence and asserting that, you need to look at us as human beings. There were a number of community based art organizations like En Foco and more. The realization that art can be a vehicle to engage—
Isabel: —and make change—
Julio: —and convey thoughts and feelings that different communities are facing in the United States is something that has a history. [Art Against Racism] is built on a foundation of using images as a way of asserting identity and calling presence.
-Julio, you’ve described the creation of your work “Vietnam Service Medal” as an opportunity for you to retrieve your humanity after the Vietnam War. You’ve also mentioned that this fight for retrieval is something that many soldiers have done, and that these medals are ironic “icons” of a war that reward good conduct to individuals who “excel” in battle. Being a veteran, having witnessed this country’s tug of war (pun not intended) between the stated goal of “friendship” with other countries, and the violent methods used to achieve it—can you give me your thoughts about the role that art plays in this dynamic, the role that civilians—civilian life—plays in establishing friendship between individuals, even as institutions are the agents of oppression against individuals?
Art making is a catalyst for human beings to understand themselves and the world around them. The arts enable us to explore ideas and depict life. It allows us to deconstruct our lived experiences. It is a space where we explore the meaning of being human at this time in history. The arts connect people from different backgrounds to one another. Institutions are made up of individuals that are constrained to work within a set paradigm so through community engagement which requires institutions to go beyond their mission or to alter their mission.
I came back with serious post-traumatic stress that I didn’t begin to deal with until the mid-1990’s. I was having post-traumatic stress throughout my undergrad at Queens College, the Graduate Center, working as a professor and working as a Dean at Rutgers University…we were not welcome coming back from Vietnam. We had a hostile environment, both in the community and when I was doing my undergraduate—
Isabel: —not because you went voluntarily—
Julio: we were drafted, but some of us went voluntarily. Nevertheless, there was resentment of the War which manifested in resenting the young men who were in Vietnam and came back.
Isabel: I think there isn’t enough credit given to the veterans of color who entered the university for the first time and were a part of the protests that forced the institutions to rethink their moral stance, to reconfigure who was coming to the university.
Julio: My experience coming back and being angry all the time led me to go school and try to find out, why the Vietnam War? What were the historical forces that placed young men in Vietnam? What the hell happened? At the same time, as someone of color, I was dealing with racism that was still present when I came back. I remember when I met Isabel, looking for apartments, because she was lighter skinned, she would go look for the apartments [instead of me].
Isabel: We used to take my sister or a white friend to get rentals. We could not find a place. If we went first and the apartment was available and then [later] Julio went with me, then boom, the apartment was gone. You have no idea how painful that was.
Julio: I started doing the Vietnam Medals in 1996. It’s my obsession, it’s the way that I deal with my post-traumatic stress. It’s because of this art that I’m able to find peace, in some way, and also convey to people that look at it that war is horrible. It’s horrible for everyone who experiences it. That’s why I talked about also realizing the humanity of institutions that are also oppressive. You have to recognize their humanity too. You have to a find a way of having them discover their humanity.
Let’s talk about your gallery.
Isabel: When we came to Kingston, we looked around and asked, where are the artists of color in the Hudson Valley? Carmen Lizardo, the Dominican Artist that’s here in Kingston, said there are lots. But the gallery is not showing their work. So we said okay, let’s get a space, let’s not make it exclusively black, exclusively Puerto Rican, but make let’s make the statement about, “here’s the gallery, and we’re gonna have a few white artists that may fit in, but the majority will be artists of color, always artists of color.” The gallery was up for four years. Did you know that today is the day that we’re closing the doors of the gallery? You asked us about the future [of the gallery]; here’s the thing, the rent has gone up tremendously. We’re working on a space in Brooklyn that will not cost as much as this gallery costs us. We’re hoping that we’ll open in the fall of 2025. We’re hoping to bring some artists from here and also include artists from the city. We used to show artists from here with artists from the city.
Julio: Because of the exhibitions we had, a community sprung of artists who were here, but didn’t know each other. They met at the galleries and openings and actually became friends, and visited each other’s studios.
Isabel: It’s been a really rich four years, but the rent here has blown up three times from what it was from when we first moved here eight years ago.
My next question was regarding an interview you gave regarding the housing crisis in Kingston, and your desire to, through your gallery, include people in the artistic/community discussion even as they were being pushed out by rent.
Isabel: It was really challenging because we realized that we were the outsiders who were able to get this space, and other people are doing this sort of thing, and it’s causing the rents to go sky high and it’s displacing people. We got to know people working in the bodegas, people who are sending their kids to college for the first time, immigrants…who could afford the rent because it was okay. But I have to say, Kingston has a really good mayor. He’s conceptualized with the community, and Kitt Potter (the manager of the arts for Kingston) and she’s been an extraordinary advocate for the local community to be heard and recruited us to remind the mayor that this [affordable housing] needs to be done. It’s a two-edged sword.
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