Experience ¡Cuidado! at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, June 7–September 27, 2025, a video installation by X Arriaga Cuellar and Adán Vallecillo that explores Honduran care workers’ labor.
¡Cuidado! X Arriaga Cuellar + Adán Vallecillo
June 7–September 27, 2025
Blaffer Art Museum, Houston
¡Cuidado!, a multi-channel immersive video installation by X Arriaga Cuellar and Adán Vallecillo, centers the intimacies of care work and the daily experiences of Honduran home care aides working in New York City. Made during a year-long process of research and community outreach, each performance describes specific roles and responsibilities of the aides’ work, such as bathing, medication management, and repositioning patients.
In the videos, each action is taken out of its daily utility and transformed into ritualized movements and social practices. These actions oscillate between meditative and mundane: one woman engages with a pill dispenser as if it were a time dial, while another takes her own blood pressure, pressing the bulb in rhythm with a soft melody she hums.
In Spanish, ¡Cuidado! means both Caution! and Care. This duality signals the complex nature of such work, and the formal choreographies of often-unseen labor. The exhibition is accompanied by a robust program of workshops, performances, and public talks, as well as a series of museum staff workshops that engage the questions of how a museum can care for and with its communities.
About the Artists:
Grounded in on-site research, Adán Vallecillo’s work bridges sculpture, installation, drawing, performance, and video. By repurposing found industrial materials and labor, Vallecillo transforms everyday situations and objects into subjects of reflection. His work is collected by CIFO Foundation, Miami; Bronx Museum of the Arts; Phoenix Art Museum; Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York; and Daros-Latinamerica, Zürich, Switzerland, among others.
X Arriaga Cuellar is a multi-disciplinary artist, archivist, and curator based in New York City. Their curatorial work focuses on Central American performance and visual art. Arriaga Cuellar is the co-curator and founder of Cinco Estrellas, an archive dedicated to the collection and preservation of Honduran cultural memory.
¡Cuidado! was presented originally at Performance Space New York. At the Blaffer Art Museum, the exhibition received major support from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston.
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