Collection: Rafael Montañez Ortiz

Rafael Montañez Ortiz (born 1934) is an American artist of Puerto Rican and Native American descent whose destruction performances, archaeological finds art, and digital works have engaged violence, ritual, and decolonial politics since the late 1950s. A pioneer of Destruction Art, he performed acts of controlled demolition—dismembering mattresses, destroying pianos—as a means of confronting social and psychic repression. He founded El Museo del Barrio in New York in 1969 and has exhibited internationally, with work held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art.