Broadway Mall Association (BMA)in collaboration with Five Flies Coffee proudly announces a community poetry reading in connection with the art exhibition, Pablo Caviedes: The Unknown Way. This exhibition showcases 20 of the artist’s original works from his CRANIUM series, displayed along the Broadway malls from 150th  to 158th Street last year to commemorate the Day of the Dead.

Pablo Caviedes’ CRANIUM series is a powerful meditation on identity, migration, and mortality. Through intricately rendered skulls layered with maps, indigenous symbols, and human visages, Caviedes uses a universal symbol of death to represent an exploration of cultural memory. Merging Western memento mori traditions with Latin American iconography, his work blurs boundaries between life and death, homeland and exile, and the physical and the digital. Each skull is a visual archive of the immigrant experience: fragmented yet resilient, rooted yet in motion. CRANIUM invites viewers to confront the fluidity of identity and to question what it means to belong in an ever-shifting world.

Poets from around New York City have been invited to interpret these works. The poets include Diogenese Abreu, Omar Ballardares, Eric Baker, Alan Britt, Karla Coreas, Jenna Jenkins, Alex Lima, Azekiwe Providence. Each will dynamically integrate the unique black and white skull images with the written and spoken word. This unique program reflects the Broadway Mall Association’s mission to create meaningful cultural programming in multimedia ways in the communities that it serves. Five Flies Coffee is a community institution and small business that provides delicious beverages and locally-sourced food to the Washington Heights neighborhood. It also supports local artists through these type of event and the collaboration with BMA and Pablo Caviedes is the perfect marriage of art and local business development.