Luis Gispert

Luis Gispert
(b. Jersey City, New Jersey 1972)
Lives and work in New York, NY

Untitled (Car Girls), 2001, C-print 

Collection of Dr. Robert B. Feldman

Artist Luis Gispert stages photographs about identity construction to question how we choose to define others and express ourselves based on the uniforms we don and the culture from which we identify, be it African American, Asian American, Latinx, or otherwise. Guispert is of Cuban heritage and was part of a significant group of artists in Miami informed by Hip-Hop culture when it arrived in South Florida in the 1980s and had its greatest impact in the late 1990s.  He explores and fuses ideas about personal expression through fashion, one’s self-made identity, with popular culture, its social and economic development, in the Cheerleader Series. Here, two women clad in nondescript cheerleading uniforms sit in the back seat of a leather-clad car adorned in hip-hop culture finest – yellow gold rings, bamboo hoops, and watches with motifs of money, music, bling, and violence. Their gold charms, or code symbols add to their attire, wearing the logo of the Wu Tang Clan rap group and an embellished Tec-9 submachine gun, an affordable firearm invented in Miami that would be used by rival gangs in the city and popularized as a major assault weapon throughout America. The women’s necklaces float away, seemingly levitating from their chests as though the car bounces on hydraulics in tune with music or is being driven fast and erratically. The women look unnerved and hold each other’s hands, gazing in opposite directions, something has gone awry here in front of the chroma-kay green screen – a film tool giving the viewer the ability to place the subjects anywhere, in any situation.