Moses Ros Suárez

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel: ¡Muchacho¡ Here we are after the election night, and I am thinking, “How can I sit with all of this and refocus?” Perhaps talking with you is a good place to start. I don’t recall how or where we met, and I do remember your supportive presence through the years. I remember your laughter as well and your thoughtful optimism. All of this will be needed in the years to come. So, tell me about your beginnings in the creative field.

MR: We met at an art exhibition opening of Dominican artists in New York City. I enjoyed drawing as a child–from nature to comic books. Born and raised in Manhattan, I got involved in the subway graffiti art movement in the early 1970s. My tag, my graffiti name, was SAL-161, and my work ranged from magic marker tags on walls to spray painted top to bottom masterpieces on subway cars. I transitioned from the subways to canvas when I joined up with the Nation of Graffiti Artists (NOGA), a neighborhood organization that gave support to graffiti artists to help them transition to the mainstream art world. It was here that I sold my first painting, a large, seven-foot by five-foot spray-painted canvas. I am featured in the book Nation of Graffiti Artists by Chris Pape (Beyond the Streets, 2021), which isnow in its second edition.

In 1975 I was living in Santiago, Dominican Republic, where my mother’s family is from. I participated in the National Art Contest in Santo Domingo, and I won a second-place prize for a surreal oil painting, Mundo Destruyéndose.

NDEREOM: I was born in Santiago as well. I was talking with a curator, and she mentioned your connection with Keith Haring. I have read how Haring’s work was inspired by life in our barrios in New York City, and by creative responses to the day-to-day and the struggles in our ghettos. I am saying this directly and after reading books like Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails, by A. Cruz Malavé. A great deal of our Latinx legacies have been lifted off the pages of our narratives and claimed by others.

MR: In the late ’70s I started attending Pratt Institute, where I studied architecture. I continued to create numerous large paintings and murals, staying connected to the graffiti world. In 1982, I met the artist Keith Haring and invited him to participate in one of my mural projects on 84th Street and Amsterdam Ave in Manhattan. This is a mural I updated every year from 1981 to 1995 as part of the Dome Project Street Festival.

NDEREOM: I can picture that mural clearly. That was my neigborhood of 15 years. I think that there is a clinic where this piece is. We have talked briefly about the influence of your mother in what you do, and you shared with me how she carried Dominican legacies and strands from one island to another; meaning from Quisqueya to Manhattan. Can you speak about this?  

MR: My mother came to New York City in the 1950s, fleeing the tyranny of the dictator Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. It was in New York that she met and married my father, who was also fleeing that tyranny. Subsequently, they had me and my older brother, who is a priest. My father returned to the Dominican Republic in 1959 as part of the 14 of June group to put an end to Trujillo’s brutal dictatorship. He was killed in his effort to free the country.  My mother never remarried and worked as a seamstress in a factory making children’s clothes while raising my brother and me. Their legacy is loyalty, devotion, and perseverance.

I curated an exhibition in 2016, Tyranny’s Tear, at the Bronx Art Space with mostly Dominican artists addressing the Dominican dictatorship. I exhibited an artwork dedicated to my parents titled Honoring My Mother and Father.

NDEREOM: I am very sorry to hear about your father. We belong to some kind of field that speaks of Dominicanyoridad (my neologism) and diasporidad in terms of ways of being, ways of relating to New York City, ways of talking and dressing and eating, ways of going back and forth in mind and spirit to our Island… I have seen this sensibility become more tenuous and to be on the verge of being slowly dismissed. I will open the space up for you to talk as you wish of anything and all things Dominicanyork…

MR: As a Dominican York, a person born and raised in New York City of Dominican descent, and given my family history, my Dominican identity is very important to me. I created an artwork Provincia 32 Nueva York Republica Dominicana, referring to New York as the 32nd province of the Dominican Republic due to the vast Dominican cultural community that exists here. El Reggaeton Del Bachatero is another artwork that addresses the experience of Dominicans in New York, split between their adopted city and their homeland. I have met many influential individuals, from poet Pedro Mir to musician Luis Díaz, here in New York. In addition, I am a founding member of the artist collective Dominican York Proyecto Gráfica, a group of Dominican artists working in New York. Everything on the island is here–the language, the music, the dance, the food, and its people. The Dominican Republic is part of the United States, and the United States is part of the Dominican Republic.

NDEREOM: Your creative work continues to be centered on communities at a time when art has tried commodifying street art, as in graffiti. How are you able to retain this level of honesty and continue to thrive as a person and as a creative?

MR: Direct to the public is the best way I know how to retain a level of integrity in my art practice, working on subjects and ideas that are important to me. For instance, I recently completed an interactive sculpture, The Welcome Table, commemorating the one-hundred-year anniversary of James Baldwin, the American writer and civil rights activist. The table will be part of the James Baldwin Plaza in the North Bronx. The public will be able to sit at the table and interact with one another to promote dialogue and perhaps stir action to create a sense of community and progress.

NDEREOM: Plantains are the new thing now. But new to whom? No to me.  They are new to an art industry that is willing to receive the most recent and trendy objects, shiny goodies, dealing with this subject without connecting them to history. You have been working with the plantain for decades, maybe before I did in the 1990s, when I would fry plantains in museum and gallery spaces. With all the talk on elders, I simply wanted to acknowledge your legacy and hear you talk about it.

MR: I want to uplift people, and part of that work is to counter a term like “banana republic,” a disparaging phrase to describe poor, exploited agricultural Latin American countries whose main staple and export may be the plátano (plantain banana). In my art, I give the plátano wings to fly, thus empowering this “lowly” symbol and expressing a sense of freedom.

I had a solo exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Aterrizaje / Landing, which was a reflection on migrations to the United States caused by environmental and manmade disasters and catastrophes that have wrenched people away from their homelands.

In this exhibit, I created large, freestanding sculptures using cut-out plywood sheets to form a type of DIY “assembly kit” of the work. The large-scale, painted winged forms, along with the post-cut template panels that once held them, are juxtaposed within the space. Set against the terrace walls and surrounding the composite sculptures, the now empty forms of the template panels are reclassified and labelled with the underlying socio-political reasons behind the mass migrations. 

NDEREOM: You live in the Bronx. How do you weave such disparate realms, the place where you live in the Bronx and the Other places in our borough where you do a significant amount of artwork?

MR: Where I grew up in Manhattan in the 1970s, I was poor in a rough neighborhood with gangs and drugs. I have worked hard to achieve a level accomplishment for my family and me.  As for navigating the city, this is the capital of the world, and one has the opportunity to explore all that it has to offer. People are people, and I treat everyone fairly, joyfully, and generously as best I can.

NDEREOM: What would be your message to the pillars of Dominicanyork culture in the city? These are the ones who have walked the path when we were a handful and who have been doing the work in a physical community before Instagram and the age of influencers.

MR: We are stronger together; this is very challenging and needs to be encouraged. To support each other is no easy task, and communication is key to success. Create a nurturing environment for growth to flourish. Empower each other to achieve significant progress.

NDEREOM: What is your message for the younger generations of artists of Dominican descent in our city? There seems to be such a gap, where many of the younger have no idea of what we have done in the last four decades.

MR: In addition to pursuing individual careers, work together to achieve collective goals. As I have said previously, we are stronger together. The rewards outweigh the challenges.  When we pursue collaborations, a boost is given to everyone and their work.

NDEREOM: What are your intentions for the days ahead?

MR: I will continue to be a positive force, spreading a joyful message with laughter and high spirits.

All images and videos courtesy of Moses Roe Suárez

Moses Ros Suárez’’s links: Website / Instagram / Contact

Ros has had solo exhibitions at Sugar Hill Museum, Bronx Museum, and the Yeshiva University Museum in New York, as well as the Paterson Museum in New Jersey. He has also exhibited in the Yoryi Morel Room of the Institute of Culture and Art in Santiago, Dominican Republic.

Ros has received several public sculpture commissions from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The Bronx Council on the Arts, and the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

His artwork is found in corporate and public collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, and the AT&T Collection, among others. He is a founding member of the Dominican York Project Gráfica (DYPG) printmaking artist collective and the ArteLatAm artist group. He began printmaking at The Bronx Printmakers and has worked at some of the top printmaking workshops in New York, including Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Lower East Side Printshop, and Manhattan Graphics Center. He is a registered architect in New York and earned his bachelor's degree in architecture from Pratt Institute University.

Ros is a sculptor, painter and printmaker of Dominican descent who lives and works in New York City.