Bad Bunny was the most-streamed artist on Spotify for four years. He headlined the Super Bowl, singing in Spanish, challenging long-held ideas about what it means to be mainstream. His career highlights how streaming platforms, diaspora audiences, and shifting cultural power now determine global relevance.
Launched during his years teaching at Stanford in the mid-1980s, the Rockin' Jalapeno Band drew upon his earlier career as an R&B musician in San Antonio, and later, Las Vegas. But the inveterately curious Cuéllar kept expanding the Rockin' Jalapeno sound, deepening its connections to New Orleans grooves, jazz, and soul. Over the decades, the group included dozens of top Bay Area musicians, including many who went on to lead their own bands, and became known as a sure-fire act for fundraisers, community events, rallies and protests.
An exhibition of Wifredo Lam is about as safe a bet as the Museum of Modern Art can place and still plausibly say that it's a bet on expanding the canon. The Cuban artist is one of the most famous painters of the 20th century, featured in almost every single key show about Surrealism. MoMA acquired his famous painting The Jungle in 1946, a few years after he made it.
"The four large-scale canvases that constitute the core of ' Misfits' maintain the fundamental elements of the artist's visual lexicon while radically reconfiguring compositional structure and spatial organization. These works advance a design freedom that is simultaneously forceful and controlled, achieving a balance between expressive intensity and formal restraint. As such, the series marks a decisive moment in Nuñez artistic evolution and possibly an initial step toward a more profound and transformative reorientation of his practice."
One of the great things about making art is discovering something that sprang from seemingly nowhere. In retrospect it looks logical but in the moment it's an epiphany and suddenly it's exciting to explore it. My studio is across the street from Creative Woodworking and they have a box where they put scrap wood for anyone who wants it and it's irresistible to me.
The artists José Parlá and Claudia Hilda, his wife, live in a former fire station in Fort Greene surrounded by memories of Cuba, which Parlá's ­family fled in 1970 and where ­Hilda lived until recently. "There's a lot of magical realism here, a big mix of Cuban traditions and religion," says Parlá, pointing to an icon of la Caridad del Cobre, the island's patron saint, in the kitchen. "We cannot move her!"
Last summer, she was one of the interpreters at his 30-date concert residency in Puerto Rico, No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí (I Don't Want to Leave Here), which injected hundreds of millions of dollars into Puerto Rico's economy. With lyrics that capture the grief and alienation of Puerto Ricans forced to leave home in search of opportunities, Bad Bunny's 2025 album Debí Tirar Más Fotos became a global phenomenon that continues to resonate across cultures.
Edward Simon was in his mid-teens when he left his home in Punta Cardon, Venezuela, for good and settled in the United States, driven by his desire to learn about jazz at the source. His quest has taken him to breathtaking creative heights with achievements visible both at home, where the Emeryville pianist and composer is the longest serving member of the SFJAZZ Collective, and abroad, via regular tours throughout Europe.
