San Juan, Oct 20 (EFE).- Afro-descendant Puerto Rican artists sharpen their creativity in the pioneering exhibition “Puerto Rico Negro”, which opens this Friday in San Juan, to anticipate the oblivion of their roots and the scourge of the slavery of their ancestors.
The exhibition, which occupies four rooms of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC), is the first institutional exhibition on the island that presents 38 Afro-Puerto Rican artists in a historical context and an intergenerational dialogue.
“There are some who are working more with abstraction, others refer more explicitly to racial themes or extractivist relations, whether colonial or referring to the legacies of the plantation. There are also musical explorations, there is a very large variety,” Marina Reyes, co-curator of the exhibition, tells EFE.
With a collection that includes paintings, photographs, sculptures, videos and drawings by Afro-Puerto Rican artists from the island and the diaspora, who until now have had more difficulty exhibiting their works in Puerto Rico’s museums.
Reyes indicates that as a starting point it explains “why certain artists organized and reaffirmed their blackness as Puerto Rican artists in the 90s and what the trajectory of some of these artists has been, but also putting them in dialogue with the Puerto Rico of the diaspora or other generations”.
Inspired by a bold sample from 1996
The co-curator, who has been working on this exhibition since 2019, details that in Puerto Rico there was an exhibition in 1996 called “Paréntesis: eight contemporary black artists”, where that group of artists “affirmed themselves in their blackness, in their Puerto Ricanness.” and as contemporary artists”.
He emphasized that “those three points” were something that they wanted to return to “to highlight them again” in the current exhibition, which will be open to the public until September 2024 with works by Jesús Cardona, Daniel Lind, Nitzayra Leonor, Tony Cruz Pabón , Edrimael Delgado Reyes, Cielo Félix-Hernández and Clotilde Jiménez, among others.
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Reyes affirms that the exhibition 27 years ago, which was held at the Arsenal de la Puntilla in Old San Juan, curated by the artist Edwin Velázquez, marked a before and after in the visibility of contemporary black artists on the island.
The Afro-descendant community continues to suffer discrimination and underrepresentation in Puerto Rico, which led in 2021 to the enactment of Law 24, which designates the “Week for the Eradication of Racism and Affirmation of Afro-Descendancy.”
In the 2020 census, the percentage of Puerto Rico residents who identified as black – alone or in combination with another race – increased to 17.5%, while almost 50% chose the two or more races option.
Black artists of the diaspora
“We want to recognize the reality that there are many people who have also been pushed to leave Puerto Rico, not only in the past in the 50s or late 40s whose parents settled in the United States and that is why they were born there, but also constantly the different economic crises or even the search for development of their careers have led them to leave,” Reyes emphasizes.
For María Elena Ortiz, guest curator of the exhibition, this initiative is relevant because “in Latin America, in the United States, in Puerto Rico right now there are many dialogues about what black heritage is in all these different contexts.”
“In Puerto Rico in particular, the doctrine has always been that the Puerto Rican is African, Taíno and Spanish, which has created a very exuberant idea of culture, but it does not take into account the difference and the richness that exists in that difference,” he points out. Ortiz.
For this reason, the guest curator, who has been working on “Puerto Rico Negrx” since 2020, considers that the time has come to “celebrate and distinguish these artists.”
“Black Puerto Rican artists are still not exhibited to the same magnitude and in the same quantity as white Puerto Rican artists,” he says.
(c) EFE Agency
2023-10-20 19:00:52
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