BE(COM)ING DATA: Portraits Against The Algorithm
06.26.25
Quincy Market Upper Rotunda | Faneuil Hall
206 S Market St, Boston, MA 02109
Featured Artist: Cesar Manuel Perez
Curator: Anupallavi Sinha
In Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, artist Cesar Manuel Perez turned the walls into a living, breathing protest against erasure. From glitched portraits and styled mannequins to immersive projections and live performances — the show challenged everything we think we know about identity, surveillance, and self-fashioning.The space pulsed with beats, poetry, and presence. It was raw. It was layered. It was unapologetically unreadable.This recap captures the power of the moment — the artists, the collaborators, and the community that made this counter-archive come alive. BE[COM]ING DATA is a bold exhibition of works created by Dominican-American artist Cesar Manuel Perez, whose expressive and unfiltered canvases challenge how identity is visualized, packaged, and processed in contemporary society.
Hosted at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, the exhibition takes over one of the city’s most iconic civic spaces with over 100 original works, including paintings, projections, styled objects, and performance. What emerges is an immersive counter-archive—disruptive, rhythmic, and deeply human. A sonic protest pulses through the room. Mannequins wear vintage garments like body-memory. The walls don’t just display—they confront. BE[COM]ING DATA is not a show to walk past—it is a space to be moved by.
Through recurring portraits, symbolic abstraction, and the visual language of the city, Perez critiques the overlapping systems—data science, institutional surveillance, and global fashion—through which Black and Brown people are seen, sorted, or erased. The title raises a central question: Is the artist “becoming data” against his will? Or resisting becoming data entirely? Perez invites us to confront what it means to be seen under systems that flatten, diagnose, or commodify identity.
Across the exhibition, emotionally charged, often distorted faces reappear—each demanding visibility while refusing simplification. These are not polished images of identity; they are confrontational, layered portraits of people living under scrutiny. They are rendered, glitched, reassembled—spiritual in force and political in their resistance to being labeled, diagnosed, or turned into trend. Perez uses painting as a corrective lens, exposing the violence of being made “legible” by systems designed to control, not care.
A parallel critique unfolds in Perez’s engagement with fashion. He exposes the ways in which style—especially that of Black and Brown communities—is mined for profit by industries that strip it of context. Referencing streetwear, vintage culture, and Black aesthetic codes, he renders faces and bodies that are unbranded, unmarketable, and wholly resistant to being trend-forecasted. His repeated visual motifs, scrawled phrases, and raw brushwork evoke an anti-lookbook: an archive not for consumption, but for confrontation. Here, fashion becomes more than surface—it becomes a survival language, a refusal, a wearable glitch in the system.
At its core, the exhibition interrogates the cultural obsession with data as truth—the belief that identity can be captured through biometric scans, diagnostic codes, or social media profiles. Perez pushes back against that logic through visual refusal. His canvases embrace contradiction and abstraction, replacing clarity with complexity. In doing so, he offers a radical counter-narrative: one where authenticity isn’t something captured—it’s something claimed.
But BE[COM]ING DATA is not a solitary act. It is a collective build.
Immersive projections, designed by Jason Lieder, extend the glitch and give digital legibility back to the hands of the artist.
Mannequins styled in vintage garments by High Society Vintage operate as wearable extensions of Perez’s work—bodies that resist branding and speak through adornment.
A live performance by Precious Davis (a.k.a. #YourAuntiesCloset) complicates how we perceive self-fashioning, ritual, and revelation.
Beats by Allston Brighton House Music pulse through the space, translating protest into frequency, memory into sound.
Discover the mind behind the art — click into Cesar’s image to learn more.
