Frank Diaz Escalet’s Art Turns Memory Into a Stage — and Hollis Taggart Is Bringing It Back Into View
A crowded dance floor in Puerto Rico, a tenement interior, a pair of jazz musicians caught in a cone of light — for Puerto Rican American artist Frank Diaz Escalet (b. 1930), lived experience was never background material. It was the subject. Works such as “Baile De Los Jivaros” (1991) and “Prez’ N’ Blue” (1980) translate memory into scenes that feel both intimate and public, as if the artist were rebuilding a world from fragments he refused to let disappear.
“Baile De Los Jivaros” centers on dancers gathered before a band in Puerto Rico. Its title points to los jíbaros, the island’s common farmers who sustained themselves from the land and have long stood as a symbol of national rectitude. The painting’s buoyant energy also reads as a declaration of identity: Escalet was born in Ponce in 1930 and immigrated to the United States at age four, carrying a sense of Puerto Rican pride into a life shaped by New York’s immigrant neighborhoods.
Escalet grew up in Spanish Harlem and Greenwich Village, leaving school after eighth grade to work in factories alongside other immigrants in the early 20th century. The Great Depression marked him early and permanently. “I saw the real hard misery of the people when I was growing up,” he recalled.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Escalet served in the air force in Texas and England, widening his world beyond New York. Back in the city, he moved through a string of trades — automechanic, copper and silver smith — before teaching himself leatherwork. In 1958, he opened a leather shop, The House of Escalet, where he built a reputation as a master craftsperson with a celebrity clientele, including popular musicians.
That period also brought a partnership that would shape the rest of his life: he met his second wife, Marjorie, a painter who became his most consistent advocate. The shop’s success did not insulate them from the city’s volatility. Marjorie later described walking the day’s cash to the bank with a pistol strapped to her back — a detail that captures the atmosphere of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In 1971, the family relocated to northern Maine, seeking calm and a more sustainable life. The move opened a new chapter in Escalet’s practice. For 10 years, he made inlaid leather compositions, cutting, dyeing, and joining shapes into figurative images. Rather than turning to New England’s pastoral scenery, he mined recollection, elevating the everyday into something staged and luminous.
“Prez’ N’ Blue” (1980) distills that approach. The work depicts a trumpeter and saxophonist illuminated from above, with leather transformed into monochromatic yellow and purple beams that animate the performers. The image folds nightlife into craft, and craft into a kind of painting — a bridge to the canvases he would later make.
The pursuit of art, however, was inseparable from hardship. A heart condition kept Escalet from working full-time, and Marjorie became the primary wage earner. The couple also faced racial discrimination alongside financial strain. In 1986, their son, Danny, died by suicide. Escalet’s grief was unguarded: “I would have given up everything I ever could have been, or am, if I could only have saved my son.”
Marjorie’s belief in his work did not waver. “The colors flow out of him… As soon as I saw the first pieces he created, I knew he would be famous,” she said. With her encouragement, Escalet worked daily for more than a decade, eventually shifting from painted leather to conventional canvas using Marjorie’s art materials.
A late-1980s painting such as “New York 1920s” (1989) signals that transition. The composition zooms in on an urban sidewalk with an almost photographic intensity — feet, gum stuck to a shoe, a kinked cigarette butt — turning street-level detail into a charged portrait of city life.
Taken together, Escalet’s story reads as a distinctly American arc: migration, labor, craft, reinvention, and the stubborn insistence that art can hold what history and circumstance try to erode. His work does not romanticize struggle, but it does insist on the dignity of the people and places that formed him — and on the power of color, rhythm, and memory to keep them present.
