Cruz, Jampol, and Wahi discuss the integral process of building community, the resilience required to produce public art that speaks honestly to the queer diasporic experience. By dissecting manifestations of sexuality, desire, and masculinity in early works such as green,howiwantyougreen, the artist illustrates the complex interactions born from public displays of homosexuality. In this manner the intricacies of the nuanced environment created in back/backrooms are illuminated: the negotiation of privacy, the fleeting pleasures of intimate rendezvous far from watching eyes, and the efforts to grasp at the bittersweet wisps of memory left in their wake. 

black/backrooms melds together the disparate worlds that construct Cruz’s personhood. The gallery is wrapped in a hand-drawn composition illustrating the contrasting, transitory nature of his diasporic identity, creating a memoryscape through depictions of things hidden, saved, and collected. From the baroque furniture of his grandparents' home in Puerto Rico, to the melding of male bodies deep in the woods, Cruz creates a play between the body, the space it inhabits, and the physical landscape. 

This swirling, atemporal atmosphere comes to its pinnacle through the exhibition’s centerpiece: ornamented chandeliers that inundate the gallery space, forming a canopy of histories for visitors to traverse. Reflections on the transitory nature of existence, both environmental and personal, are further drawn out as Cruz breaks down the collages and archival remnants of his past— a sketch of his first partner, drawn in 1995, and a timeworn photograph of his late grandfather make clear the unavoidable process of change and the sense of mourning we’re left with in its wake. 

black/backroom prompts viewers to immerse themselves in the poetic haze of the past’s ephemerality.