![Arlete Soares, Meu Mestre [My
Teacher], 2007. Portrait of Mestre Didi.
Color photograph, Courtesy of Arlete
Soares.](https://warholfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/7_Mestre-Didi-Retrato-EDITADO-Aprimorado-SR-760x570.jpg)
Raphael Montañez Ortíz: Breaking the Limits will be the artist’s first major retrospective in three decades and will introduce new audiences to the prolific creative output of an under-celebrated avant-garde iconoclast. The exhibition will document the seven decades of his ground-breaking art practice that has expressed itself through performance, film, digital media, paintings, collages, ready-mades and deconstructed objects. Ortiz is best known for his role as the first director of El Museo del Barrio, which he founded in 1969. The first Latino museum in the US, Ortiz designed it to be an institutional home for the work of under-represented living artists and a center to address under-served populations through arts education. Raphael Montañez Ortíz: Breaking the Limits is an assertion of his importance as a role model and influence on new generations of socially engaged artists as well as those exploring the cathartic and ritualistic dimensions of performance.