No Crying Allowed on the Barber Shop

In his installation Pepón Osorio (1955) presents an exhaustive catalog of the imaginary of that sector of society — its tastes, fashions, objects — to create a space that is physically small but large in social and cultural connotations: the barbershop in a Latino neighborhood in New York City. The title alone is a warning, handed down generation by generation, of the purest sort of “machismo”: not crying when you’re a kid in the barbershop is synonymous with courage, and consequently of acceptance into the male world.