"Urban spaces provide numerous ambiances to be felt with all the senses. Whether we think of a lively outdoor marketplace or an ordinary parking lot, an attractive historical center or an accessible subway station, the very way we relate to these places is based on the sensory experience they provide."

- Jean Paul-Thibaud (Sonic Paradigm of Urban Ambiance)

william cordova’s algo•ritmos (2 tienes santo pero no eres babalao) at Locust Projects is a meditative, immersive site-specific installation intersecting anachronisms, fractions, geography, and temporality. The exhibition offers a milieu of permuting systems with familial or relatable patterns intended to be both specific and open-ended so that the resulting work of art varies according to the interpreter. 

In algo•ritmos cordova draws and intersects concepts from rare documents of two commercial and public service television programs, ABC’s Good Times (1974-1979) and Que Pasa USA? (1977-1980), which was produced in South Florida by WPBT. The artist is interested in the dialectical synthesis of spiritual and ritual symbology, allegory and urban vernacular architecture within these tv programs. algo•ritmos also serves as an exercise in creating a meditative platform for reflecting our public and personal memory, for observing popular culture mythology as a vehicle behind our own diverse rich cultural foundations.  

When poet Jamaica Kincaid stated, “I understood that I was inventing myself, and that I was doing this more in the way of a painter than in the way of a scientist. I could not count on precision or calculation; I could only count on intuition”, she was alluding to that which is beyond logical reasoning, a higher power and ultimately a tool for the redistribution of power.1 cordova further references architect Coleman A. Jordan who wrote, “through my autobiographical architectural con-structs, I want to reach into the past to reconstruct the present, and create spaces and details in which there are no ‘invisible’ people.”2  

The algo•ritmos (2 tienes santo pero no eres babalao) installation parallels and synchronizes two fictional tv families by focusing on architecture as a pillar for story telling by challenging, decolonizing its built environment. cordova recreates, to scale, the sets that once housed the fictional moments in both, Good Times + Que Pasa USA? TV while proposing the audience use memory to re-assemble narratives, presence and commonality as a phenomenon that is infinitely occurring all the time around us.

In addition to the large-scale architectural structures, the exhibition includes a video loop of a recently discovered promotional trailer for an unaired locally produced WPBT TV show titled, “Sak Pase USA” (1981). According to the artist, it is claimed that the unearthed local educational program archived on 3/4" U-matic analog videotape cassette was, until recently, housed in a public storage site among other obsolete videotapes. cordova, along with artist-filmmaker Barron Sherer, explain that the 3/4" videotape was carefully low temperature oven-baked, which is a process of heating magnetic tapes to remove moisture that can cause sticky or gummy residue. This archival preservation tactic is often applied to older analog videotapes exhibiting "sticky-shed syndrome" which enables tape to be digitized and then accessed in a digital format. Hard copies of WPBT letterhead text accompany this rare product of media archeology, and appear to address the unaired TV program.

“My family stories provide a window for what I have to say. I exist in and only as a context. I am what that context has created. I do not have a hidden, inner, or true self that lies waiting for my discovery. I have been created by my experiences, and I am recreated-over and over again- by each new experience.”

-Viola F. Cordova (Windows and Academics: How It Is, 2007)

The exhibition is on view in Locust Projects Main Gallery from August 16 through October 25, 2025.

Notes

1 Jamaica Kincaid, “Lucy.” New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990.

2 Coleman A. Jordan | EBO, “Autobio-graphic Architecture: Reconciling African American Identity with the (In)Visible Past.” Souped-Up and Un-Plugged: Constructing Identity. Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) 86th (1998): 435-442. link 

Acknowledgements

The artist wishes to extend special thanks to Edwidge Danticat, Gean Moreno, Wolfson Archives, Barron Sherer, Hattie Mae Williams, Miguel Newberry, Luis Gispert, Viola Cordova, Mike Evans, Manuel “Cookie” Mendoza, Lorie Mertes, lou anne colodny, Andre Leon Gray, Charles Burnett, Miami Central High School, Westview Middle School, Nicolas Guillen Landrian and Jean Pierre Louis. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

william cordova (born in Lima, Peru. Lives /works, Miami, New York). Received an MFA from Yale University and BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is an interdisciplinary cultural practitioner interested in the roots of abstraction, history of textile encoding and non-linear narratives. cordova illuminates the synthesis of memory, ritual and mythology to further disrupt, challenge and reassess definitions of our collective landscape.

cordova has exhibited internationally in venues such as the 50th Venice Biennial. Prague Triennial, 13th Havana Biennial, Whitney Biennial, Prospect III Triennial, Site Santa Fe Biennial, Prospect III Triennial. He co-curated the Tulsa Greenwood Massacre Centennial in 2021, founded and co-curates the Florida AIM Biennial. Awards include: Smithsonian Fellowship, Trellis Art Fund, Lunder Institute Fellowship (2025); Creative Capital Award (2024); Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2021); Art Matters Award (2020); Knight Arts Foundation Award (2022); and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2011). Recent solo exhibitions include: 2 Tienes Santo pero no eres Babalao, Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru and What the Forest Remembers at Marion Goodman Gallery, New York (2025).