Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures

April 23, 2026 – August 2, 2026, El Museo del Barrio, New York

Installation view of Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures, April 23-August 2, 2026, at El Museo del Barrio, New York, 2026. Photograph by Matthew Sherman/Courtesy of El Museo del Barrio, New York.

Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures offers a long-overdue recognition of the pioneering photographer Sophie Rivera, whose work reshaped the visual language of Nuyorican identity, feminist practice, and American photography. Bringing together nearly 200 photographs, unpublished writings, archival materials, and ephemera, the exhibition traces Rivera’s formal experimentation and her commitment to self-representation from the 1970s through the 1990s.

The title refers both to Rivera’s use of double exposure as a photographic technique and to the layered identities that structure her practice. As a Puerto Rican woman artist working in New York, Rivera challenged dominant conventions of portraiture by foregrounding complexity, intimacy, and multiplicity. Her iconic Latino Portraits, originally shown in the New York City subway, celebrated everyday Puerto Rican subjects and brought images of community directly into public space.

Presented at El Museo del Barrio, an institution with which Rivera maintained a decades-long relationship, the exhibition situates her work within feminist, Nuyorican, and postwar photographic histories. Through portraits, self-portraits, urban landscapes, documentary images, and experimental works, Double Exposures restores Rivera’s vital place in the canon while expanding conversations around identity, visibility, and representation.

LINK To El Museo del Barrio, New York

Courtesy of El Museo del Barrio, New York.