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A collection of works by artist Angel Suarez-Rosado entitled Babalu-Aye is on display at the David A. Portlock Black Cultural Center, 101 McCartney St., until Oct. 23.
Two free public events at the center will be held in conjunction with the exhibit. Suarez-Rosado, a resident of Saylorsburg, Pa., will present a brown bag talk about his career and the exhibit noon Thursday, Oct. 2. That evening, from 5-7 p.m., a reception will celebrate the collection and the artist.
“My installation is a general tribute to a number of different deities,” explains Suarez-Rosado, a native of Puerto Rico. He says that the name Babalu-Aye represents Saint Lazarus in African culture. “In many of the rituals, Babalu-Aye is both the patient and the doctor, the pain, and the anesthesia. He is the Messenger of the Gods and Physician to the Poor.”
In the exhibit, Suarez-Rosado uses found objects that he has attached to crutches, one of the symbols of Babalu-Aye. The installation is a “kind of offering, the taste that each divinity has and needs for healing, as tools of the immediate reality,” he says. He explains that Saint Lazarus is the “Orisha,” or deity, of disease.
“By allowing my work to growto expand without shame as a comfort in my ethnic reality,” he says, “I am able to preserve the religious beliefs of my ancestrals.”
Suarez-Rosado previously had a display entitled Dream House 315 at the ArtSpace Gallery in New Haven, Conn., and has been a part of group shows at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Penn State University, and the Atlanta College of Art Gallery. He received his master of fine arts degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and attended college at SUNY in Buffalo, N.Y., and the University of Puerto Rico.
The exhibit and related events are part of Lafayette’s celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, which takes place Sept. 15-Oct. 15.