Join artist Lizania Cruz, Adobe Creative Resident at MoMA, and Loisaida, Inc., for a day of programming on the Lower East Side. Loisaida, Inc., is a Puerto Rican multidisciplinary arts and culture community development organization founded in 1978. Through readings, conversations, hands-on activities, and music, this program will invite audiences to listen to and learn from the individuals and organizations building resistance networks for environmental justice between the island of Manhattan, Puerto Rico, and its diaspora. Together, participants will honor the Lower East Side legacy of community gardens as spaces of community building and environmental resilience.
This program takes place in person at the La Plaza Cultural community garden.
Schedule
12:00 p.m.
Poetry reading hosted by the Nuyorican Poets Cafe featuring Caridad De La Luz, Felipe Luciano, Angel Rodriguez, and Kaila Bulé
1:00 p.m.
Discussion on “Island Networks” with Loisaida, Inc.’s Alejandro Epifanio and El Puente’s Elisabet Díaz Cintrón and Jorge Luis Berrios
2:00 p.m.
Break
3:00 p.m.
Collective mapping activity focused on community gardens as ecological “islands” within the urban environment, facilitated by Lizania Cruz
4:00 p.m.
Closing community Afro-Puerto Rican Bomba music performance
Alejandro Epifanio Torres is a Puerto Rican multidisciplinary artist, cultural worker, and community organizer based in New York City’s Lower East Side. Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, he holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and has presented artistic and curatorial work in New York, Puerto Rico, and internationally. Since 2020, Torres has served as executive and artistic director of Loisaida, Inc., a historic Puerto Rican–founded multidisciplinary arts and culture organization rooted in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. His work bridges artistic practice, cultural preservation, community organizing, and nonprofit leadership, with a particular focus on culturally grounded civic practice, placekeeping, immigrant and Latinx communities, environmental justice, media and technology, and the role of arts infrastructure in strengthening community power.
Elisabet Díaz Cintrón is a multidisciplinary visual artist, educator, and cultural activist whose work champions socioeconomic equity and community storytelling. Born in Puerto Rico and based in New York, she uses her creative platform to explore human emotion, environmental connection, and social landscapes. Her advocacy-driven practice includes her New York debut in Art for Change’s Faces of the Economy, alongside features at the Bronx Latin American Art Biennial and the Brooklyn Museum’s GO project. As a core member of El Puente CADRE, Díaz Cintrón curates public art events and leverages grassroots visual arts to empower local communities and inspire collective social change.
Jorge Luis Berrios is a Puerto Rican poet, performer, actor, director, educator, and cultural organizer based in New York City. Born in Santurce and raised in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, he holds a bachelor’s degree in theater education from the University of Puerto Rico. He is the author of Encuentros: Poetic, Multidisciplinary and Interactive Anthology and has contributed to poetry anthologies and publications. His interdisciplinary practice bridges poetry, theater, performance, cultural preservation, and community engagement. As a resident artist at El Puente from 2022 to 2024, he produced Encuentros, an event series centered on healing and dialogue. Currently pursuing a master of arts in liberal studies at SUNY Empire State University, he researches Taíno mythology, cosmology, identity, and contemporary poetry.
Loisaida, Inc., is a Puerto Rican–founded multidisciplinary arts and culture organization rooted in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Established in 1978 through the neighborhood’s grassroots organizing traditions, Loisaida works at the intersections of art, culture, social justice, community development, urban ecology, media, and technology. From its home at the Loisaida Center on East 9th Street, the organization supports artists, cultural workers, youth, elders, immigrant communities, and neighborhood residents through exhibitions, artist residencies, public programs, media production, environmental justice initiatives, cultural preservation, and multigenerational education. Its work is grounded in the Puerto Rican and Nuyorican histories of Loisaida while engaging the broader Caribbean, Latinx, immigrant, and diasporic communities that continue to shape the neighborhood. Today, Loisaida serves as both a cultural anchor and a platform for community-based artistic practice, preserving neighborhood memory while creating space for new forms of cultural expression, civic participation, experimentation, and collective action.
Lizania Cruz is a Dominican participatory artist and designer interested in how systemic issues, mythmaking, historiography, and language shape our understanding of otherness and belonging. Through research, oral history, and audience engagement, she develops projects that expand and share pluralistic narratives on migration. Cruz was a 2024–25 Fellow with US Latinx Art Forum and in 2023 she received the New York City Artadia Award. She was part of The Shed’s Open Call in 2023, 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone at the Aldrich Museum in 2022, and ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 2021, the first national survey of Latinx artists at el Museo del Barrio.
The Nuyorican Poets Cafe is a nonprofit organization rooted in the legacy of spoken word truth-telling. Founded by Puerto Rican/Afro-Caribbean poets and visionaries, we honor this sacred history by creating an accessible forum for developing poetic, theatrical, musical, educational, and visual/media works and programs in the spirit of downtown New York subculture.
Caridad De La Luz (LA BRUJA) won an Emmy in 2022 and in the same year became the Executive Director of the NUYORICAN POETS CAFE where she began her career in 1996. Caridad has balanced her career of activism, education, spirituality and entertainment. She received the Puerto Rican Women Legacy Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award from The Bronx Historical Society and was honored as A Bronx Living Legend. She was named “Top 20 Puerto Rican Women Everyone Should Know”.
Felipe Luciano is an activist, poet, and author of the book, “Flesh and Spirit: Confessions of a Young Lord.” He became involved in student activism in the 1960s and soon became known within activist circles for his membership to The Last Poets, a group of Black Power era artists mentored by Amiri Baraka. Because of his local popularity as a Harlem artist and progressive activist, in 1968, Luciano was approached by a group of mainly Puerto Rican, Latino youth who wanted to launch a radical organization oriented around fighting against Puerto Rican poverty and racial oppression. Eventually, that cohort of young students launched a New York chapter of the Young Lords Organization (YLO), the Puerto Rican counterpart of the Black Panther Party. Luciano was elected chairman of the New York group. Under his leadership, the YLO changed its name to the Young Lords Party (YLP) and became one of the most influential Puerto Rican organizations of the 1960s.
Angel R. Rodriguez Sr, is an interdisciplinary musician, teacher, actor, poet, visual artist, and advocate, who navigates the creative realms between the Bronx, NYC, Puerto Rico and the world. His diverse practice in music form, in spanning, assemblage,and installation, of the coordinator of Living Legends Series at The Point CDC the Bronx, delves into themes of race, migration, memory, sacred materiality, and identity, as well as preservation of who is who in the creation of music in the Americas. Angel’s unique blend of music recordings redefines traditional cultures, constructing in music immersive environments that provide cultural and historical context for the socio-political challenges faced by Puerto Rican communities in both the Puerto Rico’s archipelago and New York City. Angel is dedicated to honoring narratives of collective and individual strength, resistance, resilience, and dignity.
Accessibility
This event takes place outside. There will be bathrooms available nearby. Bleacher-style seating is available, as well as a limited number of chairs with backs. The event will have sound amplification. The entrance to the garden is an uneven surface composed of wood chips. For questions or requests regarding accessibility, please email [email protected].
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