“I was a recipient of the CLACLS summer travel fellowship, 2013 to conduct research towards my dissertation on the Nuyorican artist, Adál Maldonado, (tentative working title–Traditions and Transformations in the Work of Adál: Surrealism, El Sainete, and Spanglish). Adál (born Adál Alberto Maldonado in Utuado, Puerto Rico, 1948) is a contemporary multimedia artist whose work resists easy categorization.  Though his work is rooted in the medium of photography, it is also performative, informed by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Puerto Rican literary and theater traditions such as the sainete, a popular theatrical form imported from Spain to Puerto Rico, which employed the language of the common man and its typical subject matter of the comical distortionofreality.  His artistic practices include photography, performance, installation, video, music, sculpture, and film. My dissertation will argue that Adál was the first visual artist within the Nuyorican movement to incorporate text with image to express a Nuyorican identity using Spanglish, a hybrid language that employs both Spanish and English.  Adál alone among visual artists in his circle has expressed the Nuyorican identity throughout his body of work through the use of the written and spoken word.  In his multidisciplinary production, Adál has developed and consistently made use of language as a means to inform and complete his images so that they function as both visual and spoken works of art.  The artist considers his fotonovelas and self-portraits to have performative and film qualities.”