Art

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  The Oldest Colony (2018)

The Oldest Colony project aims to capture the political limbo Puerto Rico exists in, built by its territorial status and self-identity crisis, both being carried on for more than 500 years of colonization. She depicts the chaos of politics, hardships of the economic crisis, hurricane Maria’s aftermath, and the celebrations and contradictions in all of these aspects

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  Dead Man in the Ring (2014)

“In this work, Muriente documents Puerto Rican funerary practice in her ongoing project The Business of Death. Meditating on the relationship between representation and death, the artist films and photographs wakes where the deceased has been staged in a realistic setting, such as in a bar or in a boxing ring, according, in most cases, to their explicit instructions. These moments speak to yearning for visibility shared among the dead and the living. Overall, through the representational acts, artists comment on their own agency in relation to their race, gender, and sexuality and showcase the analogous ways they are enmeshed with the environments they inhabit.”

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  Watch your step / Mind your head? (2015-17)

Irene de Andrés and Sofía Gallisá Muriente present a selection of works developed between 2015-2017 that tackle the question of who constructs the concept of paradise and who consumes it the most, as experienced from the Caribbean nation of Puerto Rico. Within the island’s colonial context, both as a former Spanish colony and a ‘possession’ of the U.S., the two artists work in tandem to question how cultural differences are marketed within the new colonial relationship that the tourism industry embodies. They work in photographs, prints, installation, and video formats, remixing original and sourced materials including photographs, short documentaries, propaganda, and vacation videos from various official and personal archives, as well as the internet.

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  A Puerto Rican Obituary (1971)

This is a poem written about the Puerto Rican experience in the U.S., encapsulating the lives of boricuas whose cultures remain eternally tied to Puerto Rico, but live on mainland U.S.A. Although Spanish colonizers named it “rich port”, it will always remain in its Taino name, “Boriken,” to them. The poem was first read in a rally in support of the anti-imperialist Latino youth group, the Young Lords Party. The poem follows 5 characters for whom the American dream is deferred, Pietri all the while addressing themes of racial injustice, labour, and death. His poem looks to create a cultural consciousness among the Puerto Rican community, and also a social awareness around social institutions, alienation in urban life, the socio-economic and political status of Puerto Rico, and the fact that the American dream was made for a certain kind.

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  El Puerto Rican Embassy (1994)

Pietri collaborated with graphic artist Adal Maldonado on this artistic endeavor, founding a website, www.elpuertoricanembassy.org. This encompassed a ‘Puerto Rican passport’, naming ambassadors to the arts, and composing a national anthem written in what is known as ‘Spanglish’. El Puerto Rican Embassy, described as a ‘sovereign state of mind’, affirmed Puerto Rican Identity in the metropolis, proclaiming artistic liberation by challenging the confines of Puerto Rico’s colonial condition which deprives islanders of their own citizenship and diplomatic and political representation.

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  The Museum of the Old Colony (1992)

The title is a play on words referencing the island’s political status as well as a popular local soft drink named Old Colony. This art installation is composed of collected artifacts, both objects and images, related to the history of Delano’s homeland, all of which span more than a century, illuminating the oppression of the island’s past and simultaneously alluding to the reality of its present, this reality being that it still remains an unincorporated ‘territory’ of the U.S. where its people continue to be exploited, underrepresented, and ignored.

This is emphasized in the insufficient federal response to the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017 led only to more widespread devastation in the form of displacement, suffering, and death, making clear the second-class, disposable status of Puerto Rico to the U.S. The Museum of the Old Colony also pushes the viewer to imaging the connection between past and present, exoticizied images of devastation, abandonment and exploitation, which remain prominent and topical. It is also a way to better understand and come to terms with the troubling history of Puerto Rico, and is a work that liberates the story of a people from the limitations of history narratives, museums, and popular culture.

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  Objetos indispuestos, inauguraciones suspendidas o finales inevitables para un casi-baile (2019)

In this ‘choreographic event’ for the Whitney Biennial, Nibia Pastrana Santiago explores and unpacks the concept of the incomplete and unfulfilled, inviting audiences to reconsider different ways to understand choreography. She explores choreography as a demarcation of space and an inherently territorial act. To her, the relationship between choreographer, performer, and audience, is one which is enmeshed in a complex and intricate power dynamic – one that she relates to the U.S.’s colonial force enacted on Puerto Rico. She investigates the history and physical characteristics of San Juan Bay.

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  We The People (1990’s)

This was Ward’s first solo exhibition. A large portion of the works in this exhibition were from the 1990’s, issues of this period such as poverty, racism, consumer and material culture still resonating today.

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  Amazing Grace (1993)

This exhibition consisted of over 250 dilapidated baby strollers that Ward found abandoned. These were arranged around an aisle of flattened fire hoses, accompanied by Mahalia Jackon’s voice singing Amazing Grace. This is meant to push viewers to think of the lives these strollers once had and held, be it children or the possessions of the homeless, a commentary on the early 1990’s New York, the state of Harlem and the devastation caused by the drugs and AIDS epidemics. In addition to this, Ward also reaches back into the histories of colonialism and slavery, the fire hoses arranged on the floor being echoes of the hull of a ghost ship.

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  Sky Juice (1993)

This monument was made from an iron fence, overgrown with dilapidated textiles which look like entrails. It is intended to reference Jamaican drinks sold by street vendors, made out of ice, syrup, and water, poured in a bag and drank through a straw. The fence holds up a shredded umbrella, mutilated plastic bottles filled with photographs, and clumped textiles coated in sugar and Tropical Fantasy soda (originally founded in Brooklyn and gained popularity in poorer neighborhoods). Tropical Fantasy was rumoured to have been laced with an agent capable of sterilising Black men.

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  Breathing Panels (2015)

Through this piece of work, Ward looks at history, and unrepresented or marginalized voices in history, and how it is constantly evolving. Acknowledging that history tells a particular story, Ward puts forth the idea that there are also a multitude of stories which remain untold, that remain invisible within the one or few mainstream narrative/s. This is not so much an idea of ‘replacement’, but bringing this new form or portrayal to the forefront, simultaneously destabilizing it, so that it acts as a placeholder for other possibilities or somebody else’s narrative/s

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  Breathing Circles (2018)

This series was made in copper, and references a Congolese cosmogram which represents birth, life, death, and rebirth, and also served as breathing holes for runaway enslaved people who hid under church floorboards on the Underground Railroad. For Ward, seeing the magic and power of these patterned holes on the floor conveyed, the idea was that these enslaved people were trying to preserve their history in this important form of resistance – the coded breathing hole pattern on the floors that served as space for the basement’s ventilation. To Ward, this was a powerful thing that was preserved and used in a radical way, the holes  were both visible and invisible at the same time.

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  Pure Plantainum (2006)

Pure Plantainum is a series of photographs and sculptures, focusing on an icon that first appeared in colonial Puerto Rican art – the plantain. This icon has signified Puerto Rican cultural and political sovereignty, maligned African ancestry, and masculine identity. He works with these to show how the meaning of symbols change through migration. “In the Spanish speaking Caribbean,” Luciano explains, ​“the plantain is a signifier of national culture, and is also embedded with layered vernacular references to race and class. As plantation workers were identified by the notorious ​‘stains’ that plantains left on their clothing, class and labor associations became increasingly radicalized. For example, one who has dark skin might be labeled as having inherited ​‘la mancha del plátano’ or ​‘the stain of the plantain,’ a racist colloquialism that persists in vernacular expression, equating blackness to a stain upon skin or culture.”

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  Pimp my Piragua  (2008-09)

Luciano created a ‘pimped’ out version of what is known as a piraguacart, or a shaved-ice pushcart, made with a fiberglass exterior, sound system, and flat-screen monitors. Piragua carts, for Caribbean migrants have often functioned as quick start-up businesses during tough financial times. Luciano’s take on the piragua cart in this highly exaggerated yet still functional manner calls attention to Latino ingenuity, allowing him to parade this marker of Latino history and culture in the midst of rapidly gentrifying urban communities.