leenda

The Bata Project: Urban | Island Folklore by Leenda Bonilla

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 16:35:24 GMT

Opening Reception: Wednesday, May 20, 2026, 6 PM

The Bata Project is a multimedia journey into "contemporary urban island folklore." In her debut solo exhibition, Puerto Rican artist Leenda Bonilla deconstructs the bata—the house dress that serves as the unofficial uniform, armor, and sanctuary for generations of Caribbean matriarchs.

Opening in the wake of Mother’s Day and culminating during the vibrant energy of the National Puerto Rican Day Parade , this show is a deeply personal exploration of lineage and legacy. At the heart of the installation sits a significant piece of history: the original bata belonging to Leenda’s late mother . This garment serves as the North Star for the exhibition, anchoring Bonilla’s community collages, linocut prints, photography, and video archives in a legacy of real, lived love.

Moving beyond the domestic walls, Bonilla reimagines this humble garment as a vessel for history and a symbol of Boricua resilience. The exhibition captures the rhythmic pulse of the islands as it beats within the modern New York landscape.

The Immersive Cultural Experience

Larger Than Life: A towering, bata installation that hangs as a tribute to the "giant" figures in our lives. This conceptual piece bridges the gap between the intimate memory of Leenda’s mother and the massive, collective history of the Puerto Rican diaspora.
The Mother’s Bata: A central installation featuring the artist’s mother’s dress, bridging the gap between the ancestral and the present.
Community Collages: Collaborative works created with neighbors and elders, weaving collective memory into tactile art.
Print & Pattern: Bold linocuts that deconstruct the iconic floral motifs of the bata.
Video & Photography: Documenting the women behind the fabric, preserving their stories as living folklore.
The Bonchinché Bench: An interactive installation where the audience can sit, reflect and share their Bata story that's recorded by a vintage phone.

Wearing a bata is encouraged for the opening.

Bata's Collage Blueprint: Building an Urban Island Cultural Legacy

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:45:00 GMT

Workshop: May 23, 2026, 2 - 4 PM

Celebrate your roots this May. Join Leenda Bonilla to craft a personal bata narrative through collage, honoring the women who shape us.

Transform memory into art.

Join conceptual artist Leenda Bonilla , creator of The Bata Project, for an immersive collage workshop exploring the "contemporary urban island folklore" of the bata. More than just a house dress, the bata is a vessel for history, a symbol of matriarchal strength, and a thread that unites the Caribbean diaspora across city streets.

In this hands-on session, we move beyond the fabric to uncover the universality of this iconic garment. Through guided collage-making and multimedia storytelling, you will craft your own "Bata Narrative"—blending personal history with collective heritage.

What to Expect:

Guided Creation: Learn Leenda’s signature approach to community collage, using layers of texture and image to tell a story.
Sights & Sounds: Create to the rhythmic pulse of island music, surrounded by vibrant visuals of the people who have turned the bata into a cultural legend.
Connection: Share stories of the women in your life and discover how the bata transcends boundaries to unite us all.

Whether you are an experienced artist or picking up scissors for the first time, you will leave with a custom artwork and a newfound appreciation for the power of everyday fashion to weave a community together.

Set against the backdrop of May’s tribute to mothers and the upcoming energy of the National Puerto Rican Day Parade, this workshop is a space to honor our roots and celebrate our future.

All materials provided, but participants are encouraged to bring photocopies of personal family photos or fabric scraps to incorporate into their work.

Space is limited. Register Today!

The Bata Project: Material Memory, Matriarchy, and Social Practice in Leenda Bonilla’s Practice

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:51:00 GMT

Explore the bata's role in memory & matriarchy through Leenda Bonilla’s art. Engage with themes of culture & social practice.

How Art Making Heals Me

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 01:29:40 GMT

Group Show at Taller Boricua, NYC

Art Making Heals - Botanicarte!

Taller Boricua

El Barrio, NYC, 2024

Botanicarte! An exhibition at NYC's Taller Boricua cultural center showcases installation works by Latinx creatives. I was an invited artists to create and share how art plays an important dialogue on the importance of the arts in health and wellness.

Curated by Andrea Sofia Matos

The Bata Project at EFA Project Space

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 02:05:14 GMT

Join us in the Spring of 2024

Offering an enhanced public recognition of the Caribbean Diaspora, The Bata Project explores the tradition of house dresses worn in the Caribbean, mainly by women at “home” through community engagements incorporating aesthetics that honors folklore in the urban landscape. By infusing a contemporary lens into intimate memories via community exchange, this project offers a generative hybridity, intergenerational connections, merging of contemporary and fashion history with urban folklore, bringing oral histories, visual art and performance into the public commons.

I wanted to focus on the bata because the Puerto Rican diaspora is fast becoming an “endangered species” in New York City, and the histories we - as the Puerto Rican diaspora - know are also disappearing. Within our current urban contemporary life, it is not common for women to wear “batas" or house coats anymore. They are now considered folkloric. I believe that it is important to recognize and remember our matriarchal figures wearing these special clothes and how that represents sustaining home, culture, families and life. This public project shares how this day dress was part of our matrilineal superhumans, who handled layers of everyday jobs, wearing the bata as the last of the work uniforms worn before bed and/or on weekend mornings, clearing the home, yelling at Con Edison over the phone, making breakfast for the morning meal.

This public project is an opportunity to reconnect and celebrate the bata as an urban folk piece and elevate this domestic dress evolution through an interdisciplinary exhibition of visual art, storytelling, performance, and music. The twist is how this project highlights this “at-home island fashion” into the conversation, and raises visibility for maternal lineages along with the impact of the home and community life on our public life within contemporary urban folklore. There are many cultures who have house coats as part of their home life. Focusing on the bata creates a deep connection with other folkloric histories around this day dress also known as the duster, muumuu, or housecoat - which brings the bata into a universality with many other cultures in NYC.

I invite peers and community members of all ages, genders to participate and wear their batas to join in the interdisciplinary discourse of this project via visual art, storytelling, music, and sharing of folklore. Gatherings occur through a series of public events which highlight this house dress and creates interconnections with fashion and fusion of the isla/urban communities. With multiple creative access points, this project offers agency to multiple community members and artists as well as the general public.

In this process of togetherness and community building, the focus is on the energy of the group that gathers, and the group grows organically through word of mouth as previous participants invite their friends and family members to join them at the next public gathering. This togetherness supports invitations to the public to join in the conversation and share stories.

As The Bata Project unfolds, we will witness how this dress - worn outside in the public eye - subverts social expectations and celebrates the power of home and stories connected with home, care, the body, and history as something you bring with you everywhere.

These gatherings include photo sessions and video documentation of public sharings.

The Bata Project Promo Video

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 17:51:05 GMT

directed by artist, Leenda Bonilla; produced & edited by L.A. Pagán

The Bata Project uses the bata, a traditional house dress, to explore stories of Caribbean womxn and the journey of transnationalism to sustain family, culture, and community within the local-global diaspora of NYC.

The Bata Project at AiOP

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 21:29:12 GMT

Art in Odd Places 2023

Join me on October 13 - 15, 2023, for an interactive piece called "The Bata Project" I created for the annual Art in Odd Places Fest on 14th St.

Growing up in NYC/PR I witnessed how the bata dress worn by my mother and other maternal figures in my life equated to me the Puerto Rican adage of “Pa'lante” or “onward”, “go for it”, or “go ahead”. Sustaining home, culture and life and seeing how this day dress emphasized the “super-shero” with all the layers of jobs that womxn executed in everyday urban living. Wearing this day dress outside home, can also meet in the center of the Venn diagram when it comes to subverting what was socially expected from our abuelas and turning it on its head.

It will be three days of fun with friends, artists, and community advocates celebrating the cultural origins and fusion of island life into NYC. Wearing this day dress outside the home brings to mind how the womxn in the Caribbean diaspora who came to the mainland were dealing with displacement from the political socioeconomic climate impacted by colonization. The goal of this project is to subvert what was socially expected from our abuelas, tias, mothers, and turn it on its head.

oin me on October 13 - 15, 2023, for an interactive piece called "The Bata Project" I created for the annual Art in Odd Places Fest on 14th St.

The Bata Project explores the stories of Caribbean womxn and the journey of transnationalism to sustain family, culture, and community within the local-global diaspora of NYC. Artist Leenda Bonilla invites local creatives, community advocates, educators to share their stories of their maternal figures and celebrate their homage to urban/island matriarchy wearing a “bata”, a traditional house dress, collected by Bonilla. Each day begins with a ceremonial catwalk of batas in brilliant colorful patterns/styles which leads into vignettes of dance, poetry, singing, urban folkloric games, and conversations.

“Art in Odd Places 2023: DRESS is curated by Gretchen Vitamvas with Curatorial Assistant: Tasha
Douge. Curatorial Manager: Sarah Starpoli. artinoddplaces.org”

This project is supported by Pepatian Bronx Arts ColLABorative.

Premiere of Boogie on the Boulevard

Mon, 08 Sep 2014 21:43:04 GMT

August 3, 10, 17 of 2014, 10 AM - 2 PM

I had the privilege of overseeing a notable social practice project focused on fostering community engagement. This initiative allowed me to leverage my passion for connecting individuals, providing an avenue for both Broxites and visitors to partake in an innovative street festival. Spanning three Sundays in August, the event transformed the center lanes of the Grand Concourse, reminiscent of the Champs Elysee, between 165th and 167th Streets—a stretch covering four city blocks—from 10 am to 2 pm. As the Curatorial Project Head, I collaborated with 88 arts/cultural organizations, civic and health agencies, independent artists, and creative work groups to curate a diverse lineup of participants. The Bronx Museum of the Arts, in partnership with the Department of Transportation and Transportation Alternatives, played a pivotal role in orchestrating this impactful community-building endeavor.

Pisa Piel 2.0 by StatusHoe Collective at AiOP

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 21:48:10 GMT

Art in Odd Places of 2012

Skin Stepper | Pisa Piel 2.0 is an appropriation of the Game Twister that challenges the lack of diversity on the catwalk. The traditional colors are replaced with four skin tones. The artists emcees sported t-shirts, displaying one of the flesh tone dots featuring a provocative quote from a fashion icon that brings the issue to light. Passersby along 14th Street in NYC had the opportunity to play and twist with all kinds.

The StatusHoe Collective creates works of art that emerge from life, challenge world perceptions and thoughts while experienced in real time. This is a collaboration of artists from various origins but converged to form a unique that invited public to view, play, reflect and dialogue. The SHC are Susanne Bifano, Leenda Bonilla, Edwin Gonzalez-Ojeda, and Susan Natacha Gonzalez. Skin Stepper | Pisa Piel 2.0 is an appropriation of the Game Twister that challenges the lack of diversity on the catwalk. The traditional colors are replaced with four skin tones. The artists emcees sported tshirts, displaying one of the flesh tone dots featuring a provocative quote from a fashion icon that brings the issue to light. Passersby along 14th Street in NYC had the opportunity to play and twist with all kinds.