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Raphael Montañez Ortiz (1934, Brooklyn, New York) is a groundbreaking American artist, activist, and educator of Puerto Rican and Indigenous descent. A leading figure in the postwar avant-garde, Ortiz is best known for his radical contributions to Destruction Art, and experimental film, and for founding El Museo del Barrio, a major cultural institution dedicated to Latinx and Caribbean art in New York. Ortiz trained at the High School of Art and Design and later earned both his BFA and MFA from Pratt Institute. He went on to complete a Doctorate in Fine Arts and Higher Education at Columbia University. His artistic practice emerged in the late 1950s when he began deconstructing Hollywood film reels—cutting, burning, and rearranging them to produce disorienting, ritualistic visuals. These "destruction films" were deeply influenced by psychoanalytic theory, shamanic traditions, and his critique of dominant cultural narratives. In the 1960s, Ortiz rose to prominence as a central voice in the Destruction Art movement, a loosely associated group of artists who used acts of violent dismantling—often of musical instruments or furniture—as symbolic gestures against institutional power, war, and consumer culture. His most iconic performances involved the smashing of pianos, transforming objects associated with Western refinement into raw acts of protest and transcendence. In 1969, Ortiz founded El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, a pioneering institution created to give voice to Puerto Rican, Latinx, and Indigenous artists excluded from mainstream museums. As its first director, he envisioned the museum not only as a space for exhibitions, but also as a platform for cultural education and political empowerment. Ortiz was also active in artist-led activist groups such as the Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Art Action Group, advocating for racial equity and anti-imperialist values within the art world. His work spans multiple media, including performance, assemblage, video, and digital art, and is informed by a deep commitment to decolonial thought, identity, and transformation. His artworks are housed in major public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Centre Pompidou. Since the 1970s, Ortiz has also been a highly regarded educator, serving on the faculty at Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts, where he shaped generations of interdisciplinary artists. Ortiz’s legacy lies in his fearless dismantling of traditional aesthetics and his ongoing quest to reclaim artistic space for marginalized histories and cultural memory.