DANCING OUR PROBLEMS: LATIN AMERICAN PRESENCE AT MOCA’S ART ON THE PLAZA 2026 AWARDS IN MIAMI
In a context marked by the debate on immigration in the United States, Joan Jiménez Suero (Perú) has been recognized by the Museum of Contemporary Art - North Miami (MOCA) for a proposal that reflects on the identity, memory, and resistance of the Latin diaspora.
The Peruvian multidisciplinary artist based in Miami, Joan Jiménez Suero (Entes), has been selected as one of the three winners of Art on the Plaza 2026, an initiative by the Museum of Contemporary Art - North Miami (MOCA), as part of the institution’s 30th anniversary, for his work Bailando Nuestros Problemas (Dancing Our Problems), whose official opening will take place on April 15.
Entes is known for an artistic practice that celebrates and amplifies Afro-descendant Latin American cultures and communities. His work has evolved from the public sphere into a contemporary proposal that brings together different languages such as painting, sculpture, and graffiti.
The Art on the Plaza initiative annually invites contemporary artists to intervene in the museum’s surroundings with proposals that engage with the social and urban context. In this edition, the artist was distinguished for an installation that addresses the Latin experience in the United States through a sensitive and deeply symbolic approach.
The exhibition presents a series of moving metal sculptures that reinterpret a material historically associated with rigid structures, transforming it into a language of fluidity, expression, and reminiscence. Inspired by Afro-Peruvian tradition and popular culture surrounding salsa—a rhythm born in port neighborhoods and among historically segregated ethnic groups—the pieces—musicians, dancers, and couples on stage—evoke collective practices that sustain identity and community.
In them, dance ceases to be merely celebratory and becomes a way of enduring, resisting, and claiming space. It also becomes a gesture that sustains bonds and affirms the presence of a diaspora that organizes and survives through movement.
“The project engages with a Latin American visual genealogy that has transformed the representation of racialized bodies. Like the indigenists, who positioned Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples as cultural producers, these sculptures seek to assert that the popular is not peripheral, but fundamental,” the artist states.
Installed in the museum’s public space, the proposal projects a Latin American presence into the public sphere, connecting territories from South America and the Caribbean with a city like Miami, and reaffirming art as a space for encounter, memory, and projection.
Bailando Nuestros Problemas (Dancing Our Problems) will be on view, free of charge, through June 14, 2026.
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