“Chicken Without a Head- a Vegigante in Flatiron”

Description

Chicken without a Head (Vegigante in Flatiron) (2025)

Feeling like a chicken without a head is a common experience of those who first arrive to the city. This piece presents a vivid, surreal scene where a flamboyant chicken becomes a vejigante mask—painted in fiery reds, golds, and oranges. The head floats through an abstracted urban landscape of New York City. Feeling like a chicken without a head is a common experience of those who first arrive to the city. Buildings are massive and The Flatiron Building rises ghostlike in the background, its iconic triangular form softened by expressive brushstrokes of blue, lavender, and white. The contrast between the playful, horned mask and the monumental city architecture creates a vibrant collision of cultural iconography and modern urban space.

This artwork embodies the dialogue between Puerto Rican tradition and the modern metropolis. The vejigante, a folkloric figure rooted in Afro-Caribbean, Spanish, and Taíno heritage, bursts into the New York streets with carnival intensity. Its horns pierce through the cool geometry of the city, symbolizing the persistence of cultural identity in spaces often marked by anonymity and erasure.

The Flatiron, a landmark of New York’s architectural modernity, becomes both stage and backdrop for this transposed festival spirit. Here, the vejigante does not merely arrive—it claims space, turning steel and stone avenues into a living canvas of rhythm, resistance, and celebration. The painting suggests that diasporic identity thrives through visibility: tradition and folklore are not lost in migration, but rather reinvented and made monumental against the skyline of the diaspora city.

Dimensions: 33 in x 48 in. Original artwork painting. Acrylic on canvas, some mixed media.