Anchored in Afro-Caribbean musical traditions and ritual practices, reggaetón emerged through the circulation of sounds between Jamaica, Panama and Puerto Rico, evolving from reggae and dancehall into a Spanish-language form via Panama’s reggae en español before taking shape in the underground scenes of 1990s San Juan. Built around the dembow rhythm and distributed through informal mixtapes, it was initially criminalized and tied to working-class communities, even as it functioned as a political tool of creative expression, cultural resistance and collective identity. By the early 2000s, artists like Daddy Yankee propelled it into the mainstream—a trajectory that in recent years has expanded globally. Figures such as Bad Bunny dominate streaming platforms, emerging as defining cultural icons for a new generation, as the genre continues to evolve from subculture to global phenomenon while retaining its embodied, communal roots on the dance floor.
An ambitious exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago now attempts, for the very first time, to explore the historical evolution of dancehall and reggaetón as a cultural movement and as powerful visual and political frameworks that eventually influenced contemporary art. Curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, “Dancing the Revolution: From Dancehall to Reggaetón” draws its title from the idea of RPMs—revolutions per minute—a metaphor for musical tempo, cultural transformation and political protest, linking it to historic events such as Puerto Rico’s “Verano del 19,” during which reggaetón’s iconic dance forms became acts of political defiance on the steps of the San Juan Cathedral, where LGBTQ+ and feminist activists led perreo combativo, or “combative twerking.”
Bringing together more than 40 international artists—including Isaac Julien, Edra Soto, Alberta Whittle, Carolina Caycedo, supakid and Lee “Scratch” Perry—the exhibition traces different moments in the evolution of dancehall history and culture, underscoring the role of dance in reclaiming public and communal space: as a moment of community manifestation that fuels a sense of belonging, as much as a set of revolutionary practices for collective liberation grounded in the struggle against colonial and neocolonial control.
When we spoke following the press preview, Acevedo-Yates said that organizing an exhibition at the intersection of popular music and contemporary art had long been a dream of hers. “People often think of it purely as entertainment, as something about dancing, which of course it is, and I don’t want to foreclose that reading, but it also has a political dimension. It is a political space,” she told Observer. “These genres challenge the status quo, they push against conservative discourses, and they have a long history, even going back to the colonial era.” It’s a subject, she believes, that could be expanded much further.
While the show is groundbreaking within the art system, it builds on an existing body of academic research, particularly from Caribbean scholars who have long framed dancehall and reggaetón as performance practices rooted in Black Atlantic culture. What distinguishes the show is its placement of these traditions within the context of contemporary art, expanding a dialogue that has only occasionally surfaced in publications and prior curatorial efforts. “There have been some precedents, artists like Miguel Luciano appear in reggaetón-related publications, and others have been included in similar contexts, but I grew up in San Juan, and I’m deeply familiar not only with the genres themselves, but also with artists engaging with them,” Acevedo-Yates noted.
The exhibition traces the historical roots of these music genres, deeply linked to Caribbean ancestral traditions and spirituality as much as to working-class experience. For Acevedo-Yates, it was important to include artists whose work originates outside conventional art circuits, shaped instead by belief and a more instinctive understanding of music as a spiritual force. “I think that’s incredibly relevant today. Music reaches everyone; it’s a language that speaks directly to the spirit.”
At the start of the show, there are two symbolically resonant yet imaginatively direct works by Everald Brown—a carpenter in daily life but also a musician and painter deeply engaged with both Rastafarianism and reggae. In Nyabingi Hour, he depicts a Nyabinghi groundation, a Rastafari ceremony lasting days and nights, centered on drumming, chanting, dance and spiritual reasoning. The ritual’s call-and-response rhythms rely on three drums—bass, fundeh and repeater—adapted from Burru music, a secular Afro-Jamaican form rooted in the slavery era. These polyrhythms would later shape the development of reggae.
Nearby, Mallica “Kapo” Reynolds’s Revivalists portrays robed practitioners engaged in Revival Zion worship. A key figure in Jamaican intuitive painting, Reynolds founded his own church in Trench Town after experiencing visions in his youth. Revivalism, which emerged after emancipation in 1838, fuses Christian and African spiritual traditions. The painting captures the intensity of the ceremony, the brushstrokes translating rhythmic movement into vivid color.
In the same room, a work by Lee “Scratch” Perry shares its title with a 1976 dub album while reflecting his fascination with the cosmic and the supernatural. Created through an intuitive process of collage, it combines rocks as vehicles of attunement with geological sonic vibrations—an influence he links directly to his experimental dub practice at Black Ark Studio: “I learned everything from stone.”
The exhibition text points out that attending a dancehall is often described as “going to church”—it is essentially another ritual, where steady rhythms and an energetic atmosphere invite both transcendence and transpersonal connection. In this way, the show contextualizes dancehall within the same lineage as other Afro-Jamaican religious traditions, which similarly combine music with ritual and movement. This dimension, as Acevedo-Yates agrees, remains highly relevant today, particularly with the revival of dancehalls and raving in the post-pandemic period.
In the second room, Dennis Morris’s Growing Up Black photo series includes an image of sound system pioneer Count Shelly, Ephraim Barrett, pictured with his setup at the Four Aces Club in Hackney. The photograph foregrounds the central role of sound system culture within the Jamaican diaspora in 1970s London. Following the arrival of the Windrush generation (1948-1973), Caribbean communities established themselves in neighborhoods such as Dalston and Notting Hill, creating vital social infrastructures—clubs, house parties and gatherings like the Notting Hill Carnival—in response to racism and exclusion.
“The ghetto is created by the force of real estate,” states Isaac Julien’s Territories, an experimental film centered on the Notting Hill Carnival. Established in 1966 after the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, the carnival became both a site of celebration and political mobilization, narrated through Julien’s remix of scenes of revelry with surveillance and unrest, including footage from the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival riots—a historical anchor of broader and ongoing tensions around race, class, labor and policing in the U.K.
A room dedicated to the electric paintings of Denzil Forrester underscores the nightclub as a key diasporic space of communion and liberation. After moving from Grenada to London in 1967, Forrester described reggae, dub and blues venues as places in which to “rekindle our community spirit” in a hostile environment. His drawings and large-scale paintings are a resonant chronicle of Black British nightlife and a tribute to an emergent counterculture.
As we proceed through the show, the entanglement between dance, community and politics emerges in a cross-border, intergenerational dialogue spanning Kingston to San Juan, via Panama, New York City and London. Throughout this global journey, it is striking to observe how the political dimension operates simultaneously at the personal and collective levels—as a tool of liberation and resilience, a way of finding belonging and community, but also a collective voice and a form of protest, depending on the geographical and historical context.
“These are spaces created by communities that are often ignored, working-class communities,” Acevedo-Yates said. “I’ve always been fascinated by how forms that emerge from very localized contexts can have such a global impact,” she explains, noting how even while organizing this exhibition, so much was happening—Bad Bunny winning the Grammy again and his memorable Super Bowl halftime performance. “It all reinforced the thesis of the show.” Notably, all these cultural expressions also developed in continuous, interwoven dialogue with technology as different sound systems evolved. An entire room is dedicated to this dimension. “The sound system is a cultural space, almost a civic institution, that has shaped countless musical genres, from electronic music to hip-hop. So many of the forms we know today are deeply indebted to sound system culture in Jamaica.”
The roots of dancehall lie in the Jamaican sound system culture of the 1950s—mobile, community-driven spaces that Prince Buster described as “the voice of the people.” Initially built on imported jazz and R&B, these systems catalyzed local genres—ska, rocksteady, reggae and dub—before the digital turn of the 1980s expanded the form through shared rhythms.
Cosmo Whyte’s Sole Imperial (For Patrick Johnson) translates this history into a sculptural device that, resembling a cresting wave, evokes the improvised, mobile architecture of Jamaican sound systems. The work’s audio component brings in an intergenerational conversation with the artist’s uncle, layered with dub and reverb, revealing the sound system as both a social infrastructure and an economic engine—a device and a social space that shaped everyday life while propelling Jamaican music onto the global stage.
Nearby, Michael Richards’s Swing Lo’ shifts the register toward the spiritual: a one-wheeled, rusted chariot with neon underglow and speakers blasting 1990s dancehall and Panamanian reggae en español, while the hymn “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” invokes themes of transcendence and migration.
A similar reflection is introduced by Christopher Cozier’s ongoing Sound System project, which explores how the sound system produces both a physical site—the dance, the gathering—and a psychological one. A pile of takeaway posters that extends the sound system’s logic into visual culture is accompanied by a sound component produced by his son, musician Isaac Cozier, which blends elements of the work’s original sound from 2001 with his own beats — a powerful evocation of the sonic landscape of Port of Spain.
Dancehall signs are still everywhere in Jamaica, very much part of the daily fabric of the island. “The dancehall in Jamaica is one of the most visible and audible forms of culture. There are parties every night, sound systems during the day, it’s embedded in daily life and identity,” Acevedo-Yates said. “It’s also a space where disenfranchised youth find belonging, visibility and identity.”
Matthew Mccarthy and Maxine Walters’s The Most High—a serious ting (2026) takes this pervasiveness even further: a stack of found speakers forms the negative shape of a cross, surrounded by hand-painted dancehall signs collected from Kingston streets—a vernacular archive capturing the social and creative energy that manifests in these parties as they turn into collective rituals. “While Kingston sleeps, another world comes alive,” Acevedo-Yates explained. “Dancehall starts around 1 a.m. and continues into the morning, it’s another world entirely. And it’s incredibly welcoming. Anyone can enter. It’s a very special cultural space.”
In discussing contemporary relevance, she describes how artists across the Caribbean and its diaspora have long engaged with these cultural forms, which permeate everyday life. “Artists in the Caribbean and the diaspora have been inspired by these cultural forms for decades. Popular culture occupies a central place in Caribbean life, it’s part of everyday experience.”
This emerges throughout the following rooms, where we can trace how dancehall evolved from subculture to everyday culture to global mainstream across diasporic contexts—as a way to keep Caribbean and Latino communities together, contributing to a sense of identity and a unique voice that resonates across artistic and visual translations.
In Josefina Santos’s Dominican Soundsystems, car audio culture becomes a mobile extension of the Caribbean sound system in the Dominican diaspora of Long Island: customized SUVs and minivans outfitted with towering speakers and vividly painted chucheros become gathering sites where music and community converge—ephemeral spaces of pleasure and fun, as much as visibility and belonging.
The global circulation of reggaetón becomes explicit in Cecilia Bengolea and Jeremy Deller’s Bom Bom’s Dream (2016), where a Japanese protagonist navigates Jamaica’s dancehall scene. Blending fantasy and documentary, the work traces how its rituals, gestures and aesthetics have been reinterpreted far beyond the Caribbean, often interlacing with local traditions, as this music creates a space of free physical and sexual expression—particularly within LGBTQ+ communities, but also as a tool of feminine empowerment.
The figure of the Dancehall Queen, popularized in 1980s Jamaica, embodies the tension between body performance and erotic expression that resonates with long-standing rituals of seduction. Dancehall was considered by many at the time as a violent, vulgar and misogynistic space, but the Dancehall Queen claimed instead her role as a professional femme performer, elevated by her ability to dance and judged in competitive events on unique moves, fashion and stage presence. Performers such as Carlene Smith and Stacey established a legacy of highly stylized movement and presence, shaping a performance vocabulary that remains globally influential and rooted in Black Atlantic traditions of embodied expression. The dance floor becomes a stage on which to present, with pride and skill, a rich social and ritual heritage that continues to resonate through reggaetón.
These questions surface in the work of Aïda Bruyère, a young French artist raised in Mali, who plays with both tradition and pop cosmopolitanism to explore how identity—particularly gender and sexuality—is shaped, circulated and performed through social contexts and rituals. The Dutty Gyal Show features a fictional dancehall morning program that draws on online instructional videos to teach these dance moves; balancing humor with critique, the installation highlights the cultural significance of dancehall movement further amplified by social media performances, where the sexuality of the dance appears as a feature of natural “female war artillery,” while also revealing its contradictions, as empowerment coexists with misogyny and homophobia.
The show’s central thesis underscores how reggaetón emerges as a vehicle for collective rituals of visibility that humanity has long sought and needed. Interrogating how bodies gather, perform and negotiate space through dance, the genre is positioned as a form of resistance, belonging and cultural transmission.
This political dimension—as a politics of both individual and collective bodies—comes into sharper focus in the final rooms. Garvin Sierra Vega’s Retratos de una deuda (2023) transforms a sociopolitical condition into an immersive environment, layering politicians, nationalist figures and reggaetón lyrics to collapse history, governance and popular culture into a single field. The gallery is entirely covered in receipts issued by the fictional “House of Debt,” forming a cumulative portrait of Puerto Rico’s $74 billion debt crisis and the imposition of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico. In doing so, the work raises unresolved questions around debt, accountability and colonial power, while foregrounding the entangled relationship between national politics and reggaetón as a tool of dissent, accusation and reclamation.
A monumental reproduction of a widely circulated photograph of Bad Bunny alongside Residente, iLe and Ricky Martin evokes the historical turn of the popular uprising “el Verano del 19” in the summer of 2019. Sparked by leaked messages from former governor Ricardo Rosselló, the uprising transformed the streets into sites of collective expression. Music, dance and protest collapsed into one: bodies gathered to “perrear en la Fortaleza,” while LGBTQ+ activists staged “perreo combativo” in front of the cathedral, reclaiming space through movement, pleasure and defiance. The composition reframes the protest through historical iconography, evoking Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, while positioning contemporary figures as agents of revolution, with the Puerto Rican flag serving as both a national symbol and an assertion of autonomy. Reggaetón itself—like other once-underground cultures—is the expression of an era-defining turn amid geopolitical turmoil and shifting power dynamics in the Americas and beyond. “When I saw his image, it reminded me of Delacroix. That was a kind of watershed moment for me, where everything connected. He’s a photojournalist, and yet these different worlds intersect and coexist within these cultural sites,” Acevedo-Yates reflected.
The final section of the show shifts toward participation, recreating the social environments where these cultural forms take shape. Radamés “Juni” Figueroa’s Karaoke El Nuevo Horizonte transforms the gallery into a communal space of singing, gathering and rest. Drawing from Caribbean vernacular architecture, the installation invites visitors to inhabit the rhythms of reggaetón, dancehall and salsa, emphasizing shared experience over spectatorship. Within it, Edra Soto reworks the familiar plastic seating found across the Caribbean into sculptural elements that carry memory and social meaning—markers of everyday life that create sites of gathering, exchange and belonging around the dancehall or simply on a street corner. And Carolina Caycedo’s blue retro jukebox becomes a participatory sound device that returns us to that ritual of listening and dancing together, foregrounding collective listening as a political act.
Across these works, music and dance emerge not only as political tools but as essential practices of living and ways of asserting presence, forging community and reclaiming joy within colonial and precarious conditions. The show positions dancehall and reggaetón as collective elements of belonging and expression, where liberation is enacted not only through resistance but through the act of moving and feeling together—a cultural revolution that seeks reconnection across geographies as a counterforce to the alienation and displacement shaping contemporary life.
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