Alvaro Barrington Western Beef ft. Western Union

Western Beef ft. Western Union is the second exhibition in the Limbo Museum’s Visiting Artist Program and the artist’s largest installation to date. Extending his painting practice into a new site-specific work that responds to the museum’s unfinished architecture, the title brings together two familiar fixtures of diasporic life: Western Beef, a New York supermarket serving primarily Caribbean, African, and Hispanic communities, and Western Union, a financial service corporation through which money earned abroad is sent home to support families, build houses, and more. Moving between these two ideas, Barrington reflects on his upbringing in New York and a practice rooted in Caribbean culture, opening a conversation about boundaries, passages, and the systems through which cultural and material life is inflected.

Emerging from a study of color that underpins Barrington’s practice, Western Beef ft. Western Union treats the entire museum as its canvas. The installation consists of floor-to-ceiling PVC strips that intervene directly in the building’s open apertures, recalling the flexible partitions found in grocery stores, where they regulate temperature, separating hot and cold. Creating a kaleidoscopic passageway, the colored strips range in pinks, greens, blues, golds, and purples, grounded in observations of Accra’s landscape and kente cloth weavers during his residency at the Limbo Museum. The strips evoke the everyday material infrastructures through which labor, goods, and temperatures circulate, bringing the language of commercial and domestic spaces into dialogue with the museum’s exposed concrete structure.

The colors used in Barrington’s practice and across this installation are symbolically tied to cultural associations across the Black Atlantic, from which his referential canon spreads. Here, each shade is meant to trigger intimate associations with a product, place, natural phenomena, or to allow for new imaginative discovery. The grocery-store partition becomes more than a utilitarian reference. Western Beef ft. Western Union reminds us that the built environment may be understood as a flexible social fabric

Source: Limbo Museum