Beyond The Uniform

When Rosado-Seijo was invited to collaborate with MoMA’s Department of Education as part of the Catalyst Program, he set out to tell visitors stories from voices they don’t typically hear. The audio playlist from Beyond the Uniform is the result of a collective effort driven by the nine officers involved in the project. Like Rosado-Seijo, they are artists themselves, and their creative practices give them unique perspectives on the Museum and its collection.

“I had been wanting to work with the security guards at MoMA for a long time,” Rosado-Seijo said in late February 2021, speaking from his home base in San Juan, Puerto Rico. “Most of the guards at MoMA are Afro-Caribbean, African-Americans, Latinos, and Puerto Ricans. I was so curious… after MoMA approached him with the hope of luring the city inside the institution’s walls. They wanted to work on bringing New York into museums. The guards are definitely New York, and they definitely don’t usually have a voice. The workers have this position of being invisible, even though they actually are very public.”

Contributions from the nine security officers who participated vary widely, and all of their offerings appear in both Spanish and English. Kevin Reid, also a rapper under the name LuxuReid, addresses Kerry James Marshall’s famed 2015 painting Untitled (Policeman) in a rap with lyrics like, “So precise how I’m carving this up. I’m standing right in front of you. You ain’t looking hard enough.” Joseph N. Tramantano, a film-loving security officer who also does voice acting and drumming, uses posters for Frankenstein and a Gretchen Bender video installation to address his memories of going to the movies. Brian Wilson, who also makes art under the name Soigne Deluxe, muses on his own identity as a gay artist via a Keith Haring painting.

For Eva Luisa Rodríguez, there was no choice but to respond to a Frida Kahlo self-portrait using spoken-word poetry. She calls Kahlo a “warrior of feminism,” and goes on to address the painting: “You exude a radical inferno of politics and stereotypes in your art that will never be extinguished.” Asked about her creation, Rodríguez said, “Frida Kahlo is one of my favorite artists, and the fact that we have one of her pieces here—and that it happens to be one of my favorites [as a] feminist—was perfect.”

As Beyond the Uniform makes clear, security guards often have interesting thoughts when guarding art. “This is a breakthrough,” Rodríguez said. “We are more than a uniform. We are humans—we are artists.”

Join them to hear about how a modernist sculpture inspires graffiti, how being in uniform makes you feel invisible, finding self-love through daily visits to one painting, and other accounts from the front lines of the Museum.

For more information, see the MoMA exhibition page and the MoMA Magazine article.