Coco Fusco
Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island
El Museo del Barrio, New York
September 18, 2025 — January 11, 2026
Photo by Aurelio Fusco
Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (still), 2021
HD Video, 13:30 mins
Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM
A Room of One's Own: Women and Power
in the New America, 2006-2008
Performance documentation
Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM
El Museo del Barrio presents Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island, the first U.S. survey of the influential Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist and writer COCO FUSCO (b. 1960, lives in New York). The exhibition is spanning more than three decades of Fusco’s groundbreaking career.
Widely recognized for her incisive explorations of the dynamics of politics and power, Fusco’s interdisciplinary practice spans video, performance, installation, photography, and writing. Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island traces her extensive practice through a selection of more than twenty of her works, created since the 1990s and extending to a new photographic series on view for the first time at El Museo del Barrio.
“Coco Fusco stands among the most provocative voices in contemporary art. Her work challenges conventions, sparks vital conversations, and continues to resonate powerfully at a time of profound social and political reckoning.” —Patrick Charpenel, Executive Director, El Museo del Barrio
Organized thematically, the exhibition explores central concerns that Coco Fusco has addressed across her practice, including immigration, military power and surveillance, post-revolutionary Cuban history, and the lasting legacies of colonialism. The presentation offers an expansive view of her multidisciplinary approach through key bodies of work, including:
• Immigration Narratives: Works addressing the perception of immigrants in the US and Europe, including Everyone Here is a New Yorker (2025), a new photographic suite that extends from Fusco's 2024 public art video animation commission by More Art, Inc.
• Intercultural Misunderstandings: A room dedicated to Fusco’s projects, created in counterpoint to the 500th anniversary of the so-called “discovery” of the Americas, including a reproduction of her iconic Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992/2025), originally performed in collaboration with Guillermo Gómez-Peña.
• Interrogation Tactics: Video, photographs, and performance documentation that consider military tactics, surveillance technologies, and the exploitation of female sexuality in the War on Terror.
• Poetry and Power: A focused selection of video, featuring several works that reflect on the history of artists’ challenges to the Cuban government—a central subject in Fusco’s oeuvre. Together, this selection illuminates the breadth and depth of Fusco’s artistic vision—one that remains acutely relevant in today’s national political and cultural climate.
La noche eterna (The Eternal Night), 2023
HD Video, 1:13:45 mins
Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM
La plaza vacía (The Empty Plaza), 2012
HD Video, 11:53 mins
Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York
Acquisition enabled by VEZA New Media Fund 2022
and headline supporters South SOUTH and Niio
The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey, 2003
Video, 31 mins
Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York
Acquired through "PROARTISTA: Sustaining the Work
of Living Contemporary Artists,"
a fund from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust 2008.1
“El Museo del Barrio has been a steadfast supporter of Coco Fusco’s groundbreaking practice from early on, recognizing the power and potency of her work. This includes her participation in the groundbreaking 2008 exhibition Arte No es Vida, as well as her presence in recent collection-based shows such as Culture and the People and Something Beautiful. This survey extends that dialogue, offering audiences a deeper understanding of an artist whose voice remains as vital as ever.” —Susanna V. Temkin, Interim Chief Curator, El Museo del Barrio
Tomorrow, I will Become an Island is organized by El Museo del Barrio in collaboration with MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.
Borrowing its title from the artist's recent monograph publication, Tomorrow, I will Become an Island is organized at El Museo del Barrio by Susanna V. Temkin, interim chief curator, and Rodrigo Moura, former chief curator, with support from Lee Sessions and Maria Molano Parrado. Exhibition design by Solomonoff Architecture Studio/SAS and graphic design by estúdio gráfico.
ARTIST COCO FUSCO
Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. She is a recipient of a 2023 Free Speech Defender Award from the National Coalition Against Censorship, a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award, a 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship, a 2021 Anonymous Was a Woman award, a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.
Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented at the 56th Venice Biennale, the Sharjah Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008, and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Whitney Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona.
Coco Fusco is the author of numerous books, and she contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and numerous art publications. Her monograph publication Tomorrow, I will Become an Island was published by Thames & Hudson in 2023.
Coco Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985), and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007). She is a Professor at the Cooper Union School of Art.
EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO, NEW YORK
1230 5th Avenue at 104th Street, New York, NY 10029
