Puerto Rico Plural

What is the Puerto Rican experience about? How does it represent us? What can we say about it? Consciously or unconsciously, Puerto Rican art has been answering these questions over time. The Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (MAPR) also asked these questions to a diverse sample of people from the community through focus group discussions. The information gathered through their responses was used to develop the collaborative project that resulted in this exhibition. Puerto Rico Plural combines works of artists from different generations, historical periods, and different media, with the aim of showing the plurality of Puerto Rican art from the eighteenth century to the present. This individual and collective experience goes beyond geographical limits, and is the common essence that unites us, although sometimes it also provokes division.

Following the Hispanic American War (1898), Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States, generating a social and political dilemma that has shaped the history of the island to this day. The constant coming and going that characterizes our history (and which has now become more evident) brings new social, political, economic, and cultural challenges. The different generations of artists, through their testimonies, have been the best chroniclers of our history. Rethinking these scenarios is an essential starting point for building a better future. The artworks exhibited in this room illustrate the dream and the failure of the project of modernity in Puerto Rico, placing us within the dilemma of contemporaneity. 

Modern art emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century as a response of young artists to classical models taught by the academy, and gradually expanded to other continents. Artists resorted to the art from different ancient cultures, considered “primitive” at the time, in search of other sources or aesthetic models. This new aesthetic trend soon reached Latin American artists, who had a vast cultural baggage distant from European tradition. Central American and South American artists searched for new models in pre-Columbian cultures. 

According to historians, a national identity was forged for the first time among the “criollo” population (individuals born in Puerto Rican territory after colonization) during the English defeat in 1797, when people came from all over the island to defend San Juan. A hundred years later, in 1898, this national feeling was shaken in the wake of the Spanish-American War, when Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States of America. 

By the 1930s, approximately a quarter of the population lived in urban centers. Twenty years later, the figures doubled. A large part of these migrant populations settled in improvised dwellings, forming slums. Even today, the trace of these economic events is palpable around the island, as a vestige of a manifest urban improvisation. Artists of younger generations have developed a critical sense of consciousness and awareness, direct heirs of their predecessors in the fifties, using their art as a form of activism and protest. 

Following the Hispanic American War (1898), Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States, generating a social and political dilemma that has shaped the history of the island to this day. The constant coming and going that characterizes our history (and which has now become more evident) brings new social, political, economic, and cultural challenges. The different generations of artists, through their testimonies, have been the best chroniclers of our history. Rethinking these scenarios is an essential starting point for building a better future. The artworks exhibited in this room illustrate the dream and the failure of the project of modernity in Puerto Rico, placing us within the dilemma of contemporaneity. 

In this installation, the artist presents us with two characteristic manifestations of Puerto Rican culture. First, it unfolds the nostalgia of the people who live outside their homeland through an immense catalog of objects that refer to the collective imaginary of migrants. On the other hand, the signs and symbols of machismo are evident in the men posing in the videos, and in the large-scale tattoo painted on the wall: Forgive me, mother. 

This gallery presents the existing exchange between our artists and creators from other eras and latitudes. In addition, punctual artworks that reformulate the definition of art based on the artists’ personal experiences, in a self-referential dialogue to define their own voices. 

Landscape in Puerto Rican painting dates back to the eighteenth century, as the scenery of José Campeche’s most iconic portraits. In the nineteenth century, Francisco Oller developed landscape as an independent theme through his exploration of Impressionism, a style that sought to capture landscape under the changing effects of light.  In the twentieth century, Puerto Rican landscape continued to inspire our artists, who worked to reflect on canvas its exuberance and its unique characteristics. However, with the arrival of Expressionist figuration and Abstract art in the mid-twentieth century, landscape became more complex. 

Early in the history of Puerto Rico’s visual arts, artists sought to immortalize the most influential writers. The artworks in this gallery guide us through a historical approach to the relationship between visual arts and literature in Puerto Rico, exploring numerous metaphorical interpretations between both disciplines. 

Our customs and traditions can be seen as a weave made of the material, artistic, and spiritual manifestations created and transmitted by a human group. These values, beliefs, and practices become an image of “how we see ourselves” and what identifies and differentiate us from other cultures. Such is the case of music, dance, gastronomy, popular festivals, religious celebrations, and traditional games, among many others. 

Abstract art in Puerto Rico has its origins in the mid-1940s, with the arrival of the Spanish-American painter Esteban Vicente, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico between 1946-1947. One of his students, Olga Albizu, traveled to New York in 1948 to study with the German painter Hans Hoffman, a forerunner of North American abstract expressionism. This was not an isolated event. However, there is a very relevant chapter in the history of the island’s abstract art movement: the creation of Grupo Frente in 1977, a movement for the social renewal of art, initially formed by Paul Camacho, Lope Max Díaz, Antonio Navia, and Luis Hernández Cruz, its director. Their objective of social, educational, artistic, and cultural commitment had consequent favorable results for the creation and formation of new art collectives until our days. 

At the beginning of the 1970s, oppressed communities worldwide claimed their rights and their place in society with more impetus than ever. Puerto Rico was no exception. The struggles against race, class and gender discrimination, among others, strengthened during this time. In the 1980s, new galleries emerged in Puerto Rico, and contests and biennials were developed. A renewed art critic promoted and prepared the scene for the internationalization of the Puerto Rican arts of the time. The material and discursive repercussions of this context strongly influenced production of art, promoting technical, stylistic, and thematic breaks that were passed on to following generations. 

After decades of uninterrupted social, cultural, and political struggles, Puerto Rican visual arts grew in a multiplicity of expressions, materials, and styles. From the 1990s, a series of collectives, foundations, and activists worked and advocated in favor of the non-negotiable rights of marginalized sectors in Puerto Rico. In the following decades, national art witnessed the characteristic signs of globalization and contemporaneity. Our artists discussed international aesthetics with greater impulse, while innovatively reaffirming the repertoire of symbols and iconographies inherited from previous generations. 

It took the Museum's team a little over one year to put together the Puerto Rico Plural exhibition. The complex, yet exciting, process was documented with the purpose of sharing it with the public. Visit blog299dediego.wordpress.com, and discover behind the scenes images and insight into the exhibition's development.