Nineteen years later, I’ve found it.

A quick backstory, if you haven’t read my previous article: I have a distinct memory of an art piece I saw at the Currier Museum of Art between 2005 and 2007, when I was five or six years old. It was a four-poster bed decorated with various tchotchkes and trinkets, which told the story of a boy mourning the loss of his nanny, using bits of her jewelry to decorate her bed. I could remember the bed vividly and can even picture the gallery in which I saw it but questioned whether this memory was a fabrication. For the full story, I invite you to read my previous piece, but know that I had scoured the internet for hints of this piece with no luck.

After I posted my initial article, Cynthia Robinson, our Museum Studies Program Director kindly reached out to me with a suggestion: I should check the Wayback Machine to see if I could find a previous iteration of the Currier’s website with a listing of the Currier’s works on display at that time. While the Wayback Machine only has captures that go back to about 2011, I was able to access a 2015 version of the webpage which housed an exhibition archive that is now defunct.

Long story short, through browsing, I found “Voces y Visiones: Highlights from El Museo Del Barrio’s Permanent Collection” listed as an exhibition on view at the Currier from March-June 2005, when I was five years old. Something about it felt right, so I went to El Museo del Barrio’s Permanent Collection Explore Page. After some brief clicking and scrolling, there it was.

There it was.

After nineteen years, there it was.

“It” is La Cama by Pepón Osorio. It’s a four-poster bed that a 1991 review describes as covered in an “array of trinkets and devotional images.” (1) The bed tells the story of a “hypothetical introduction of a current lover to a deceased childhood caretaker.” (2)

And with this I knew the bed had been right there in front of me for a long time. It had been sitting quietly as though it had been waiting for me in a familiar place, a museum we have discussed countless times in my museum studies courses.

Upon further exploration, I learned that “La Cama pays tribute to Juana Hernandez, the woman whom Osorio considers his second mother. An orphan who came to live with the Osorio family before his birth, Juana cared for the artist as a child, and served as a housekeeper. After Juana died in 1982, Osorio began to recreate her lonely, difficult life, and offered her the material opulence she never enjoyed through La Cama’s exuberant color and texture.” (3)

My five-year-old self remembered that the “artist’s beloved nanny had passed away” and that “in mourning, he used materials from her jewelry box to decorate her bed as a sort of shrine to her.” A 1992 article by Joan Acocella confirms that “As a boy, Osorio used to sneak into [Juana’s] bedroom and rummage through her drawers, poring over the earrings, necklaces, rouge pots, and religious medals that constituted a poor woman’s treasure (and that probably inspired, in some measure, Osorio’s art).” (4)

My memory was real.

Here is where I must pause and say I am almost speechless at the clarity with which my tiny human brain was able to catalog this memory. While inexact, I had memorized the key details, the story of love and loss and memorialization, a fascination with shiny things and a question about how we move on and cope when the unthinkable happens. Something about La Cama’s story and materiality lodged itself in my mind and refused to let go. For years, I remembered it as a preliminary experience connecting with art, but due to its uniquely folkloric tint in my mind I questioned if it was a falsehood.

It wasn’t, though, and while I won’t get too in the weeds about what this says about art, truth, and the power of art for children, I think this story holds Something with a capital “S.” An artwork in a museum I still frequent brought me this kind of magical, mystical experience that, nineteen years in the future, lingers as my answer to so many “whys” about myself.

And so it feels incredibly poignant that a work centering around how we remember is the one I remember most as the catalyst for my lifelong love of art. Perhaps La Cama has truly achieved its aim, then, creating an immovable memory in the mind of a five-year-old, now twenty-four-year-old, over a thousand miles away from Puerto Rico, who has held onto the story of two people she’s never met.

Nineteen years in the future, I can’t help but feel this work has come to me at the right time. I recently lost someone very close to me, a person who, like Juana to Pepón, was a mentor and caretaker. Maybe La Cama gives me hope that memory exists beyond the bounds of family and time; that someone’s impact can range so far as to be inconceivable.

And still, there is something extraordinary and unplaceable I can’t quite describe about why La Cama ignites me so (and isn’t that art?!). I don’t think this story is over, either—I feel compelled to make a trip to New York to see La Cama in person. Perhaps then I will make another post more focused on its materiality.

In the meantime, thank you, Pepón, and thank you, Juana. I will hold your story close.

Works Cited

(1) Jenifer P. Borum. “Pepon Osorio: El Museo Del Barrio.” ArtForum, November 1991.

(2) Jenifer P. Borum. “Pepon Osorio: El Museo Del Barrio.” ArtForum, November 1991.

(3) Nellie Escalante. “‘La Cama’ by Puerto Rican Artist, Pepon Osorio.” Nelarte (blog). Accessed April 30, 2025. https://nelarte.com/la-cama-by-puerto-rican-artist-pepon-osorio/.

(4) Joan Acocella. “Plastic Heaven.” ArtForum, January 1992.