Alvaro Barrington 
Western Beef-High Line

Alvaro Barrington’s practice is deeply rooted in his upbringing, having been raised between the Caribbean and Brooklyn in a working-class immigrant community. His work considers the idea of home as something lost, found, and reimagined, woven together anew from equal parts of the self, community, and culture. Primarily a painter, Barrington utilizes a tactile, multimedia approach—incorporating burlap, textiles, and industrial readymades like concrete or chain-link fencing—to disrupt traditional art-historical narratives and explore interconnected histories of cultural production, from the Harlem Renaissance to Modernism.

For the High Line, Alvaro Barrington presents Western Beef-High Line on the High Line overlooking 14th Street. Resembling a rugged industrial billboard, the work swaps traditional commercial vinyl for colored vinyl strips—a material often used in supermarkets and butcher shops—suspended from the steel frame by shoelaces. Western Beef-High Line engages in dialogue with the Hudson River and the sunset vistas once depicted by the Hudson River School, a mid-19th-century American art movement. Inspired by the rhythm of New York City’s streets and the sense of community found on its sidewalks, Barrington frames this scene with plastic milk crates, a ubiquitous “readymade” of immigrant neighborhoods, used as everything from a makeshift hoop for pickup basketball games to stools and tables. The artist writes, “we are best served as an immigrant nation, in dialogue with each other… Western Beef-High Line is a contemporary ‘stained glass’ proposition—how can painting be an experience, an event, a meeting point for individual or collective contemplation of who we will choose to become as Americans?” As the sun sets each day and the light pierces the plastic, a glowing landscape emerges, one that can only be experienced together, in person, at that exact moment.