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At the center of the “Corazón del Barrio,” an exhibit at La Casita Cultural Center, is a bright teal colored balcón, Spanish for porch, with colorful clothing, instruments and photos. This porch perfectly encapsulates the meaning of La Casita to the Syracuse community, said Teresita Paniagua, the executive director of cultural engagement for the Hispanic community at Syracuse University.

“(The balcón) explains the concept of the gallery, from the beginning to the time we started doing exhibits here in 2011,” Paniagua said. “It is a space where community participation is essential to the mission of the center.”

La Casita debuted an exhibit on Sept. 18, celebrating its 10-year anniversary since opening. “Corazón del Barrio” is a multimedia collage of the rich and soulful past of the Latin cultural center. Hundreds of framed pictures and posters from dances, previous events and exhibits line the walls of the exhibit. For a tour of the gallery, visitors can watch the video tour online or visit the center at 109 Otisco St. on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. The photos and posters depict joyous moments that the center has brought to the community since opening in 2011.

The community center is a way to bring people back together after spending most of the pandemic isolated in states of fear and anxiety, Paniagua said. She would like the exhibits at La Casita to help people rediscover the sense of community that is shared in the Westside of Syracuse.

“A lot of the programming this year is intentionally designed to promote healing,” Paniagua said. “To try to find the healing through self expression through creativity, through art, in a form of therapy almost.”

The community has always been at the heart of everything La Casita has done, Paniagua said. She and the team responsible for starting La Casita went and asked the community questions about their needs and interests to better understand the people who lived there. They wanted to ensure that everything that was done at La Casita best served the interests of the community it was intended to serve.

Andrea Moreno Nogueda, the project manager of “Corazón del Barrio,” played a large part in selecting photos for the exhibit. Moreno, an SU senior, tried to pick pictures that showed off what La Casita is all about.

“We tried to pick pictures that really exemplified how La Casita was really at the heart of Westside, and how they made an impact on kids’ lives,” Moreno said.

One project that stood out to Moreno and is included in the exhibit is “West Side Through My Eyes” because it displayed what children in the community felt was important in their neighborhood. The project got students to go into the community of the Near Westside and take pictures of what they felt best represented their surroundings.

The cultural center celebrated this year’s exhibit with an opening night event with dancing, musical performances and poetry readings. Students and faculty from the Newhouse School of Public Communications helped to produce another medium of art for the exhibit: virtual reality.

Newhouse professor Daniel Pacheco and students from his virtual reality class visited La Casita Sept. 8 to film and photograph a group of dancers, led by Luz Encarnación. After a few hours, the students had taped enough footage to create a 3D virtual reality video.

“What I like about the 360 medium for something like that is that you’re right there with the artists,” Pacheco said. “And, a lot of the time these things are done on a stage and there’s a lot of distance between you (and the dancers). In this case, that entire dance is circular in nature, and so we put a camera right in the middle.”

Visitors can see the exhibit in-person or in an online video tour.
Anthony Bailey | Contributing Writer

Pacheco is using this 3D video as an experiment for future projects, he said. He hopes to continue this partnership with La Casita and help the center expand on its use of multimedia art. The professor said the partnership will focus on the “largely unknown, untalked about Latin history of Syracuse.”

As La Casita continues to prepare exhibits to put on display, the center is reopening all of its after-school learning programs for kids and is hoping to continue offering workshops to the community, Paniagua said.

“We’re definitely looking to the future, looking at what this year will bring and how we will all be here for each other, which will inspire us for what we will do next year,” Paniagua said.

Published on September 29, 2021 at 12:20 am