When Carla Acevedo-Yates started researching “Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón” more than three years ago, she didn’t know it would be her last exhibition at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
In hindsight, she says, “It’s perfect.”
Acevedo-Yates announced her departure from the MCA in May 2025, and she soon will venture to Germany for a role producing the influential art exhibition Documenta’s 16th edition with a former colleague, Naomi Beckwith. Beckwith, a native Chicagoan, was the MCA’s senior curator for a decade until 2021, when she left for a job at New York’s Guggenheim Museum.
“I’m really proud of this exhibition,” says Acevedo-Yates. “It has all these different layers. It’s very accessible, but you can go very deep as well.”
Taking up the museum’s entire fourth floor, “Dancing the Revolution” is a first-of-its-kind exhibition on view through Sept. 20. It features a range of paintings, sculptures, photography, mixed-media and sonic installations by more than 40 artists, with six pieces created explicitly for the show.
Twelve of those artists came for the April 14 opening, “which is quite rare,” Acevedo-Yates says, “and they were all so happy. It was a great moment.”
“Dancing the Revolution” is personal for Acevedo-Yates. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, she watched from Chicago in 2019 as 1 million people took to the streets to pressure Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rosselló to resign after private Telegram chats linked to deep corruption and apathy for Puerto Ricans in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria were leaked to the public.
“I was so jealous,” she says. “I wanted to be there so bad. This is my love letter to that. It’s my tribute.”
The uprisings included people on kayaks and horseback, yoga and aerial acrobatics, and groups dancing the Electric Slide. A dance protest called by the queer community for the night of July 24, 2019, turned into a celebration when Rosselló became the first governor in Puerto Rico to resign earlier that day.
“It was like a dance party, and it reminded me of this centuries-old tradition of protest in the Caribbean that really has a different lineage,” Acevedo-Yates says.
It’s a lineage that connects Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny directly to Carnival, an annual festival in Trinidad dating back to the 1780s, which Acevedo-Yates says was a joyful resistance to British colonial rule.
“There’s all these social and political underpinnings to these musical traditions that perhaps people are completely unaware of. For me, what would be really interesting is if people come away with a deeper understanding of these spaces and sounds,” she says.
The exhibition traces the intersecting origins of dancehall and reggaetón in Jamaica and Panama, respectively, genres that have since permeated through Latin America, the United States and across the Atlantic to Europe.
“It’s not just looking at these histories as entertainment, but really looking at the social, political and spiritual histories,” Acevedo-Yates says.
A 20-minute documentary looped outside the exhibition’s main entrance explains.
“Dancehall normally is the voice of the people; the voice of the ghetto,” Kingston Dub Club organizer Gabre Selassie says in the film. “It’s a form of daily news in music form. It’s what’s happening. It’s what’s going on in the streets. In the country. In the world.”
Dancehall describes both the music and a gathering space, which Acevedo-Yates sought to emulate in various ways throughout the exhibition. On Tuesday nights, “Dancing the Revolution” hosts karaoke in a gallery painted bubblegum pink, complete with a disco ball; a mint-condition, working jukebox (by Carolina Caycedo) with over 100 reggaetón CDs; Bahamian artist Blue Curry’s custom light-up cocktail bar, with inlaid speakers that bounce fine sand in time to reggae tracks; and Chicagoan Edra Soto’s usable lawn chairs which, when sat upon, bring your back side into hilariously close proximity with Bad Bunny’s face.
“People are looking for experiences, and they’re looking to feel something — especially right now. Exhibitions in contemporary art museums can be really dry,” says Acevedo-Yates. “I really want people to move through a range of emotions. It starts very musicological and it ends kind of disrupting all the conventions of museum behavior.”
“Dancing the Revolution,” overtly and covertly, navigates its two genres’ interconnected migratory patterns, which would eventually influence visual and sonic aspects of hip hop culture in the United States, infuse American pop culture and be reclaimed by drag/ballroom culture in its signature hypersexual femininity.
Indeed, this is the origin of the subtle art of twerking, noted by Laura Facey’s not-terribly-abstract 2018 sculpture, “Divine,” which enjoys a prominent place in front of a giant reproduction of photojournalist Eric Rojas’ image of Bad Bunny, rapper René Pérez Joglar (AKA Residente) and Ricky Martin taking part in the 2019 protests in San Juan.
The bridge between 1980s Kingston and 2019 San Juan, Acevedo-Yates says, is Juan Rivera’s “Amplified Panama,” a commission of the MCA marking the exhibition’s physical and temporal halfway point. The piece offers a resting place, if you can manage to sit still, with benches and plush carpet punctuated by headphones playing mixes of reggae music in Spanish.
Face one way, and you’re gazing at the Chicago skyline through an enormous set of windows. Turn around, and listeners are treated to a spectacular array of Josefina Santos’ photographs of classic cars tricked out with dancehall-style sound systems in the Dominican Republic.
“This is really a migration story,” Acevedo-Yates says. “You can’t pinpoint any of these genres to a single location. …Reggae en Español started because West Indians and Jamaicans were brought to work and construct the Panama Canal. With them, they brought records. They started singing and translating the songs from English to Spanish into the instrumental B sides and that started a whole genre. There are so many stories like that.”
Lauren Warnecke is a freelance writer.
If you go
“Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón” continues through Sept. 20 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.; 312-280-2660 and mcachicago.org
