“Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago conveys these complexities with rigor, beauty, and aplomb. The exhibition (curated by MCA’s Carla Acevedo-Yates) includes works by 37 artists who are from, or born or based in, the Caribbean, along with a few “provocations,” or inclusion of artists not strictly from the region, that allude to shared histories and methods of movement, dislocation, and displacement. With this, the show aims to question the notion of the regional exhibition by responding to the history of Caribbean exhibitions, from the 1990s to the present, that have been characterized by multiculturalism and globalization. The show’s title nods to weather as a metaphor for changing forms in artistic practice, and to the Caribbean as a bellwether of our times.

The exhibition deftly claims space by incorporating every bit of it available. Organized by interconnected themes such as territories, formal rhythms, exchanges, and traces, the show provides enough points of reference while also letting the viewer free-associate and consider what Acevedo-Yates calls the “mechanics of diaspora,” with some of the works emphasizing formal and geographical movement as metaphor for transformation.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (1995), a black-and-white photograph of a lone bird flying in a cloudy sky, is featured right outside the exhibition’s galleries, as well as in various sites across Chicago. From the MCA’s own loading dock to several stations along the city’s elevated rail system, the piece entices viewers to imagine themselves as the bird: perhaps free, alone, or migrating. Similarly exhibited as a prelude to the show in a space unto itself is a masterful seven-channel video installation by Deborah Jack titled the fecund, the lush and the salted land waits for a harvest…her people…ripe with promise, wait until the next blowing season (2022). The immersive installation features colorful shots filmed around Jack’s mother’s home in St. Maarten overlapping black-and-white segments from a 1948 Dutch documentary about the island. The videos show colonial archival footage of salt-mining along with the personal archive of the sky, pomegranate trees, sea foam, and the ocean along the shoreline. The images highlight the shore as a place of identity-formation and a signifier of in-betweenness for people who exist within the diasporas. To someone from an island, the shore can be a place of connection as well as a boundary, and the dichotomy is echoed by the emphasis on salt-mining as an extractive economy symbolic of both corrosion and preservation.

The shore is also a protagonist in one of the most evocative symbolic images in the exhibition, of Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez performing by the north shore of Puerto Rico, repeatedly throwing her painting Soy isla (I Am an Island) into the Atlantic Ocean. The resulting video, encuentrismo – ofrenda o retorno (encounter –offering or return) is displayed alongside the warped painting at the beginning of the exhibition, and the artist’s action evokes the ritual offerings to Yemayá, the Yoruba goddess of the sea. The shore is where Sánchez finds herself.

Some of the most accomplished works in the exhibition are newly commissioned pieces by Alia Farid, Marton Robinson, and Sandra Brewster that take full advantage of the barrel vault architecture of MCA Chicago’s halls, which seem to enshrine the pieces. In Blur – Wilson Harris (2022), Brewster presents a blurred portrait of the Guyana-born writer that was rubbed into the museum’s walls, suggesting connections between Harris’s own nonlinear writing as a vehicle for unknowability and Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity.” Meanwhile, Farid’s Mezquitas de Puerto Rico (2022) is a depiction of an imagined landscape of mosques and Islamic centers in Puerto Rico, as interpreted by textile artists from Iran in the form of a gigantic prayer rug. This work shares space with Christopher Cozier’s Gas Men (2014), a video installation featuring two men in business suits who perform cowboy-like poses and tricks by spinning gas nozzles above their heads or pointing menacingly at each other in a B-movie version of corporate masculinity. These works accentuate underrepresented realities of the Caribbean: while Kuwait-born Farid’s points out that the area is home to a significant number of Arab peoples, Trinidad-born Cozier centers his country’s oil production at the intersection of global industry, as yet another example of an extractive economy that permeates post-independence life.

The earliest piece in the exhibition is David Medalla’s Cloud Canyons (1963–2014), consisting of plastic tubes that emit soap bubbles in ways that constantly change the work’s form and offer a hypnotizing break in the middle of the show. The Philippines-born artist’s ever-changing diasporic identity, which encompasses his multiple experiences of migration, resonates with the kinetic quality of the sculpture.

Cosmo Whyte’s beaded curtain piece Beyond the Boundary (2022) recreates an archival image of a man holding a sign that reads “Black Wash”—a play on the cricket term “white wash”—in a celebratory audience scene from a historic win streak of the West Indies’s team over the English in 1984. This piece invites viewers to enter the second half of the exhibition, beginning with a gallery of works that reflect on the archive, including Robinson’s La Coronación de La Negrita (2022). The mostly black-and-white mural critiques representations of Blackness and racial violence in Costa Rica, both historical and contemporary, by mixing religious imagery from Catholic and African traditions in a reinterpretation of the cover of Carlos Meléndez and Quince Duncan’s history book El negro en Costa Rica.

Another notable work is Suchitra Mattai’s An Ocean Cradle, a large-scale textile piece made of vintage saris given to the artist and bells that reflect on her Indo-Caribbean heritage, migration, and matrilineal knowledge. Though not strictly archivistic, the collecting nature of the work builds an interwoven archive of the histories of women in Mattai’s life. This oceanic landscape connects them in multiple ways by bringing people together across oceans, reminiscent of the migration of Indian populations to the Caribbean during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Toward the end of the exhibition, in Teresita Fernández’s 2020 work Rising (Lynched Land), a monumental sculpture of a palm tree hovers over the gallery floor and confronting viewers with conflicting ideas that merge in this plant. As a sign of tropical leisure and a metaphor for colonial exploitation, the palm tree symbolizes the oppressed bodies of Caribbean peoples in the wake of violent histories and environmental disasters. Its roots, covered in burlap and rope, seem ready to be replanted.

After that, an unforgettable ending to “Forecast Form” is provided by María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s Sugar/Bittersweet (2010), an installation consisting of Yoruba spears, African and Chinese stools, and disks of sugar in various states of production, from dark molasses to refined white sugar, as metaphors of racial categories. The work evokes the violent landscape of the plantation or people assembled in a rigid grid of power—the latter, one hopes, with weapons that will be picked up to fight back.

For many years prior to 2000, relatively little accurate information had been compiled about race in Puerto Rico. During the first half of the twentieth century, the census questionnaire offered a stark choice: white or nonwhite. Following the establishment of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in 1952, the local government requested that the question about race be eliminated. Puerto Rico’s leaders argued that the racial categories that divided US society did not translate to the territory. The authors of a recent study of the history of the census observed that Puerto Rican officials imagined a “‘Great Family,’ made up of various racial mixtures, whose racial tolerance made it distinct from the US. Accordingly, the issue of race was not considered to be a matter of public policy that needed to be documented or addressed.”¹ The myth of racial harmony through the unique mix of three “roots”—Spanish, African, and Indigenous Taíno—was central to the concept of a modern Puerto Rican identity at the heart of Commonwealth ideology.

The 2000 census was the first since 1960 that asked Puerto Rican people about their race, and the results speak to the complex status of Afro–Puerto Ricans within this supposedly harmonious society.² The fact that the 2010 census showed a significant increase in the black population exemplifies how racial self-identification can be quite fluid in Puerto Rico. Over the past decade, activists and scholars have revisited questions regarding the validity of American racial constructs in Puerto Rico while also advocating more recognition for citizens of African descent.

Last October, the University of Puerto Rico hosted the Second Congress on Afro-descendants in Puerto Rico. Founded by María Elba Torres Muñoz in 2015, the conference is an attempt to confront the challenges facing Afro–Puerto Ricans directly, including the fact that the host university does not offer an Afro–Puerto Rican studies degree. In addition to talks about how best to revise racial terminology for the census, the symposium included panel discussions on topics ranging from racism in health care to community displacement and gentrification to Afro–Puerto Ricans’ contributions to art history.

Indeed, black Puerto Rican artists are becoming increasingly visible locally and internationally, and they are connecting with the aesthetic and spiritual traditions of the broader African diaspora. Yet the history of Afro–Puerto Rican art is not widely known. A galvanizing moment for some black artists in the territory came in 1992, amid official commemorations of the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landfall in the Caribbean. While myriad exhibitions celebrated Puerto Rican art past and present, the culture of black Puerto Ricans was broadly represented by traditional craft practices divorced from contemporary art. Seeking to redress this cultural split, curator Edwin Velázquez Collazo organized the 1996 exhibition “Paréntesis: ocho artistas negros contemporáneos” (Parenthesis: Eight Black Contemporary Artists). The show, at the Institute for Puerto Rican Culture in San Juan, featured work by Daniel Lind Ramos, Awilda Sterling-Duprey, Ramón Bulerín, Arleen Casanova, Eneid Routte Gómez, Gadiel Rivera, Jesús Cardona, Liz D. Amable, and Velázquez Collazo. In pointed statements offered along with their work, the participating artists asserted their identity as black Puerto Ricans and contemporary artists who rejected an inherent link between blackness, folklore, and craft.

By including the word “negros” in the Spanish title, Velázquez Collazo was indeed challenging “the absurdity of black invisibility in a mestizo society,” as one observer wrote about the show.³ Most critics, however, reacted negatively to the premise and attacked the exhibition’s title as well as the artists’ statements about race. José Antonio Torres Martinó, a prominent critic and artist, published a column refuting the artists’ claims of systemic racism. Torres Martinó accused the eight artists of being divisive and trying to import conflicts endemic to American society to Puerto Rico—a common defense against accusations of homegrown racism.⁴

Since 2000, only a handful of Afrocentric exhibitions have been organized in Puerto Rico, with Torres Muñoz as the common driving force behind the projects. Museo Casa Escuté in Carolina presented “Afro Caribbean Traditions: Spirituality, Art, and Resistance” (2007) and “No Permission Asked: The Afro Descendant Experience” (2015), in conjunction with related symposia. The largest and most influential show was “Afrolatinos” (2012), at the Museo de Arte de Caguas, which featured Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and African diaspora artists from outside the region, as well as other artists who identify with aspects of African spirituality and aesthetics.

MANY AFRO–PUERTO RICAN artists working today find inspiration in African and Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices. Among the most prominent is Awilda Sterling-Duprey, whose work was included in “Parenthesis” in 1996. Sterling-Duprey began her career as a painter, but became increasingly interested in movement, performance, and dance. In 1979 she became a founding member of Pisotón, the first experimental dance collective in Puerto Rico. “If they wouldn’t show my paintings, then I would work with my body,” Sterling-Duprey recalled in a recent interview. “It has been very pleasurable.”⁵ Informed by her study of African dance, Yoruba traditions, and Santeria, Sterling-Duprey’s work became an expression of her commitment to celebrating blackness. Through her religious practice, she aimed to pay homage to African ancestral knowledge. “It was also out of rebellion,” she said. “I was tired of Christian precepts, and I didn’t want to keep validating histories that only highlight exclusion and marginalization.”

Sterling-Duprey’s 2014 piece “Transparente desnudez” (Transparent Nudity) is representative of her attempts to be “close to tradition but not inside of it.” Curator Abdiel D. Segarra-Ríos invited the artist to intervene in “Cosas: apuntes sobre el objeto tridimensional en el arte contemporáneo puertorriqueño” (Things: Notes on the Three-Dimensional Object in Contemporary Puerto Rican Art), an exhibition of sculpture at the Museo del Arsenal de La Puntilla in San Juan. Sterling-Duprey moved through the galleries, responding to some of the works on view through dance while speaking about herself, her body, and the aging process. She was accompanied by Ivette Román, a singer who improvised vocalizations.

In one of the most powerful parts of the performance, Sterling-Duprey confronted a sculpture by artist Aaron Salabarrías. The work comprises a series of wooden slats carved to resemble “Zulu Lulu” swizzle sticks: cocktail stirrers in the form of a caricatured body of a black woman. The racist novelties, popular in the 1950s, came in sets of six, with each stick representing a woman at a different age from fifteen to forty years old. As Sterling-Duprey recalled life experiences from the different ages supposedly depicted in the sculptures, Román assisted by unwrapping the transparent garments the artist wore, revealing her naked body in a slow, ritualistic way. Sterling-Duprey concluded her engagement with the sculpture by bringing the ceremonial aspects of her performance back down to earth, saying “and now I’m 65 and on Social Security.”

Links between African spirituality and contemporary material culture are key to Michael Linares’s conceptual practice. The focal point of his multifaceted project “El Museo del Palo” (Museum of the Stick), 2013–17, is an installation of, well, lots of sticks: scores of them carefully arranged on plinths or hanging from walls in a manner evocative of an anthropology museum display. Authentic ritual implements on loan from such museums are among the sticks included in some versions of the project, which have been on view at the Bienal de São Paulo in 2016 and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2017. Mixed in with traditional staffs and divination rods are more worldly items such as a store-bought cane, a backyard tiki torch, and a hat stand. (The piece also includes a video titled An Aleatory History of the Stick, 2014, as well as a related publication.) Informed by Linares’s graduate studies in anthropology, the project also sparked his interest in Afro-Caribbean religion and magic. “The history of the stick is a search for the history of humanity and the human mind beyond the remains of material culture,” he told me. “I was interested in what happened in the mind of the people who made all these things.”⁶

Over the past few years Linares has delved deeply into the Ifá religious practices that have survived in Puerto Rico despite the overwhelming dominance of the Catholic Church. “As a Puerto Rican, Caribbean, Antillean . . . what made the most sense was an African religion. It is the bravest, the one that hid in plain sight to preserve itself, that syncretized to survive.” In the 2017 solo “Future Exhibition” at Galería Agustina Ferreyra in San Juan, Linares created a devotional vignette. Four pillars carved from tree stumps supported stones sourced from a river he used to frequent with his family. A wall painting depicted a triskele (three contiguous Archimedean spirals), and a spindly tree root suspended from the ceiling by wires alluded to the Ouroboros symbol, usually represented by a snake swallowing its own tail.

Linares intended the stones to be oracles with specific symbolic functions: to heal heartbreak, provide sustenance, or ensure the permanence of pleasure. One particularly beautiful piece is Clitoris (2017), a stone in a woven palm-frond covering that sits on a palm wood pedestal. It looks like an exaggerated representation of a woman’s anatomical pleasure center, but also like a swaddled creature. In addition, Linares has created a series of his own shamanic instruments. These pieces range from a set of maracas covered in guinea feathers to a branch topped by a carved snake’s head to a beautifully decorated sensory deprivation hood. For Linares, any object can be a dwelling space for spirits.

Such an overt engagement with religious symbolism is not immediately apparent in Tony Cruz Pabón’s work. Instead, he focuses on how markers of Afro-Caribbean identity and religious iconography have permeated contemporary culture in subtle ways. For the installation titled Nube (Cloud), 2013–14, at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, Cruz Pabón created an array of conceptually linked abstract drawings, many echoing the forms of a cloud, a treetop, and an afro. A lifelong salsa music fan, he also included drawings that feature the titles of songs that refer to rain. All the drawings hung in a cloudlike arrangement on the wall, while on the floor he placed an upside-down glass of water—a reference to a popular ritual designed to impede rain from falling.

Cruz Pabón’s curiosity about the metaphors and symbols in salsa and Afro-Caribbean music in general brought him to investigate the cult-like following of late salsa legend Ismael Rivera, who was revered as the Black Christ in the Panamanian town of Portobelo. Cruz Pabón noticed that the album covers for ostensibly secular popular recordings often featured allusions to Santeria and other traditional religious practices. “Those covers helped me understand the construction of images,” he said in an interview, “they are part of my upbringing. Even when my work is mostly drawing lines, my understanding of images was shaped by those record covers.”⁷ So far, the results of his research have included an installation of salsa and Afro-Caribbean music LPs, a public conference on the subject, a playlist, a video, and an as yet unpublished book that explores the visual culture around salsa and Santeria, linking it to art history.

WHILE AFRICAN spirituality is a major source of inspiration for many Afro–Puerto Rican artists, others directly address the history of radicalism spurred by dispossession and struggle in the Caribbean. One of the eight artists who participated in “Parenthesis,” Daniel Lind Ramos understands the pervasiveness of racism in Puerto Rico, even if it is obscured by official appeals to Hispanic history. “El que no tiene dinga, tiene mandinga,” he told me.⁸ The colloquialism implies that everyone has at least some black in them—a slogan often used to invalidate claims of racism. Lind Ramos was raised in Loíza, a center of Afro–Puerto Rican culture. “Surrounded by black people,” he recounted in an interview, “my primary education was full of joy, with traditions, culinary and artistic expressions stemming from an economy based on the coconut palm tree.”

In his work, Lind Ramos often explores the links between Loíza and the African diaspora throughout the Antilles as experienced through carnival characters. Trained as a painter and draughtsman, he began incorporating three-dimensional objects into his canvases in the late 1990s and now creates mostly large-scale installations, assemblages, and videos. The materials he uses, including dried coconuts and palm tree refuse, can be found in the area around his studio in Loíza. His assemblage sculptures often honor construction workers, musicians, cooks, and artisans through the inclusion of their tools, some of which also happen to be important symbols in Afro-Caribbean religions and traditions.

The artist’s 2014 solo exhibition “De Pie” (Standing) at the Museo de las Americas in San Juan featured assemblages that evoke proud and defiant figures from throughout Afro–Puerto Rican history. The imposing piece 1797 features a version of the carnival character El Viejo (Old Man), signified by a metal mask and hat. The abstract figure is surrounded by other masks made of palm tree refuse that are positioned on the wall above an array of knives. Coconut husks are piled on the floor below, some painted with crude versions of the Union Jack. The work is an allusion to militia of Afro–Puerto Ricans who defended the island from a British invasion led by lieutenant-general Ralph Abercromby. The piece also manifests a fierce desire to live in and protect ancestral land.

Land, community, sustainability, and food independence are concepts central to the work and life of sisters Lydela and Michel Nonó, who go by Las Nietas de Nonó. Encompassing theater, performance, dance, activism, and education, their practice is grounded in their experiences growing up in the Manuel A. Pérez public housing project in Río Piedras and the San Antón neighborhood in Carolina during the “mano dura” regime of the 1990s, a period in which tough-on-crime policies resulted in high rates of incarceration. The sisters are vocal in their criticism of institutions like jails and schools, as well as the medical and food industries, which they view as power centers in an oppressive system that perpetuates poverty. “The analysis is Foucauldian,” Michel explained, “but from a really personal perspective. We focus on microstories and insert them into the broader history of the country, of black people, of expropriation.”⁹

Manual del Bestiario Doméstico (Manual of the Domestic Bestiary), 2014, is a theater piece based on their memories of weekly trips to visit incarcerated uncles, cousins, and neighbors. “We were trying to outline a story from a place of our own voices that would reference how institutions have limited the possibilities of those Puerto Ricans who live at the margins of society,” Michel said. Around the time they were developing that piece, the sisters established Patio Taller, a workshop and community education center in San Antón where they present performances, host resident artists, raise animals, and grow food on a plot of land that belonged to their paternal grandparents, Don Nonó (a farmer) and Doña Manuela (a curandera, or healer).

Las Nietas’s work often emphasizes the efficient use of resources and the role of domestic labor in economic development. For the sisters, kombucha, a low-alcohol fermented tea-like beverage, is a symbol of these concerns. In addition to incorporating kombucha into their diet, they have experimented with the bacteria and yeast “mother” that is both a driver of the fermentation process and a byproduct. The material, which they equate with “vegetable leather,” featured in their installation Ilustraciones de la mecánica (Illustrations of the Mechanical), 2016–18, at the Berlin Biennale, where they used it to create curtains, masks, and various slimy female body parts. “Behind the use of kombucha is a philosophy,” Michel told me, describing how bacteria can be understood as a metaphorical foil to colonization. “The colony of bacteria self-organizes, whereas in the geopolitical colony the exact opposite happens.”

A more literal expression of the sisters’ desire for independence is Foodtopia: Manifestaciones en período de caza (Foodtopia: Demonstrations During Hunting Season), an ongoing project for which the artists hunt and trap green iguanas in the wild. This invasive species was introduced to the island in the 1970s, and with no natural predator it has become a scourge. “The only viable way of controlling the plague is hunting them and getting involved in the food chain,” Michel said, “while also getting a material (the skins) that can be used aesthetically.” The hunts, which the sisters document with photos and video, are performative and ritualistic events. The green iguana is not a traditional component of the Puerto Rican diet, but the sisters argue that perhaps it should be now. The iguana ribs they cook with honey mustard sauce in one video could be a locally sourced delicacy and a step toward correcting Puerto Rico’s dependency on food imports.

WHILE THESE ARTISTS are addressing blackness in the content of their works, there remains the challenge of creating inclusive spaces within the art world. Cruz Pabón, who cofounded the nonprofit Beta-Local in 2009, is aware of the “whiteness” that permeates many art spaces in Puerto Rico—most people who attend them are not evidently black. The phrase “evidently black” is being increasingly used to distinguish a life lived while black from a more general Afro-descendant heritage. As Michel Nonó described, “it’s very important to create the work in the place where we live. There is a lot of prejudice against people who come from the projects. There is a latent class war.” She views her art and community outreach initiatives as part of a struggle against those prejudiced perceptions. For Sterling-Duprey, the conversation about being black in Puerto Rico is evolving as a byproduct of the mass migration to the US mainland, where our local definition of whiteness doesn’t apply. As Puerto Ricans enter the US as migrants, they are deemed “people of color,” presenting them with the challenge of experiencing life in a new, marginalized way, but also influencing how they look back at the country they left.

The ties between Afro descendent communities in Puerto Rico, US-based Puerto Ricans, and the greater African diaspora are the focus of the Afro Corridor, a new project based in Loíza. Founders Marta Moreno Vega, director of the Creative Justice Initiative, and Maricruz Rivera Clemente, director of Corporación Piñones Se Integra, aim to create a network of cultural spaces across the country to help build a more viable and equitable local economy. Casa Afro, the Corridor’s cultural center, is located in a two-story house in Loíza and had a preliminary opening last February with an exhibition, talks, art workshops, and storytelling for kids. In the words of Moreno Vega, the “displacement of black people is happening everywhere around the world. So, the idea of this Corridor is to establish the places of historical importance in Loíza from an Afro-centered point of view, to determine our own narrative and imagery.”¹⁰ Many of the people involved in making the Corridor a reality have been working for decades to make space for other black Puerto Ricans. Whether it’s art, life, or the next census, it’s about time people are represented on their own terms.

Endnotes

1. Isar P. Godreau, Hilda Lloréns, and Carlos Vargas-Ramos, “Colonial Incongruence at Work: Employing US Census Racial Categories in Puerto Rico,” Anthropology News, May 2010, pp. 11–12.

2. Following the 1992 electoral victory of a pro-statehood government, the question of race was reinstated in the census at their request. This wasn’t so much about representation or inclusion of black Puerto Ricans in the national narrative, but rather about eliminating a bureaucratic difference between the territory and the rest of the US.

3. Eneid Routte Gómez, “The Artistic Substance of Color,” San Juan Star, May 6, 1996, pp. 27–28.

4. José Antonio Torres Martinó, “Artes plásticas y racismo,” El Nuevo Día, May 16, 1996, pp. 94–95.

5. All quotes by Awilda Sterling-Duprey from an interview with the author, San Juan, Jan. 27, 2019.

6. All quotes by Michael Linares from an interview with the author, San Juan, Jan. 28, 2019.

7. All quotes by Tony Cruz Pabón from an interview with the author, San Juan, Jan. 24, 2019.

8. All quotes by Daniel Lind Ramos from an interview with the author, San Juan, Jan. 24, 2019.

9. All quotes by Michel Nonó from an interview with the author, San Juan, Jan. 29, 2019.

10. Marta Moreno Vega quoted in Cyndi Suárez, “The Hidden Narrative of Racial Inequity in Puerto Rico,” Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly, Oct. 29, 2018, nonprofitquarterly.org.

Puerto Rico has been making international headlines since June 2015, when then governor Alejandro García Padilla declared the United States territory’s bond debt unpayable. Puerto Rico’s notoriety has only increased in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, as images of the disaster went around the world, and the negligent emergency response from federal and local officials became evident.

The ongoing economic and humanitarian crisis predates the hurricane. The storm exacerbated chronic problems associated with a stagnant economy, a colonial client state relationship with the US, endemic corruption, and the legacy of an assortment of half-baked neoliberal development initiatives that have been foisted on the territory for the past thirty years. In fact, the current economic decline began in 2006 with the expiration of a 1976 tax code provision known as Section 936: a package of financial incentives for American manufacturers to operate on the island. Lawmakers in the US had once prioritized development in Puerto Rico, if only to counter the allure of Communist Cuba. But with the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, the island was left to languish.

With high rates of emigration and a shrinking tax base, the local government took on more and more loans, eventually accumulating over seventy-three billion dollars in bond debt. The crushing austerity measures that have been imposed on the population to narrow the deficit include the firing of thousands of government employees since 2009 and the closure of over three hundred schools last year. Most drastic of all, in June 2016, the US Congress passed the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), which introduced the Federal Oversight and Management Board. Known locally as the Junta, this board has near total control over Puerto Rico’s finances. Clayton Gillette and David Skeel Jr., the American legal theorists behind the plan, have referred to it in their academic writing as a “dictatorship for democracy.”²

The Junta has already scaled back the local government’s powers, effectively stripping the territory of the relative autonomy codified in its 1952 constitution. The government has used its limited tax policy authorities to stimulate the visitor economy, foster tech start-ups, and entice foreign investors to live in Puerto Rico with special tax rates. These initiatives, of course, horrify many of us who believe the territory should find a path to sustainable development that doesn’t rely on temporary tax gimmicks.

For years, journalists have compared Puerto Rico to Greece, Detroit, and New York of the 1970s, prompting myriad articles about its economic woes and the population’s resilience. Central to many of these stories are inspiring narratives about artists and entrepreneurs responding to the crisis. Indeed, since Hurricane Maria, the art scene in Puerto Rico has become, if anything, more visible. The last time this kind of attention was paid to the territory’s artists, curators, and writers was in the aftermath of a wave of civil disobedience that began in 1999 to protest the killing of David Sanes Rodriguez, a civilian security guard at the US Navy base on the island of Vieques who was hit by an errant bomb. The incident sparked widespread resistance to the US military’s presence in Puerto Rico—long a source of grievance—eventually leading to the closure of the base.

This wave of activism coincided with the emergence of a strong, socially engaged art scene, anchored by M&M Proyectos, a residency program led by curator Michy Marxuach and supported by many collaborators. Marxuach also co-organized international exhibitions, symposiums, and online discussion forums. These initiatives still resonate today because they were among the first opportunities for artists to contextualize their work in relation to global production. Puerto Rico’s art world became more international overall during these years, through increased participation in biennials, public art commissions featuring local and foreign artists, the establishment of the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (MAPR) in 2000, the inauguration of a remodeled building for the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC) in 2002 and the reinvention of the defunct San Juan Print Biennial as the Poly/Graphic Triennial in 2004, spearheaded by Mari Carmen Ramírez, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

The enthusiasm of the new millennium was dampened by the economic crisis that started in 2006. Many commercial galleries closed. Still, artists and cultural workers continued to establish their own organizations. One such project is Beta-Local, founded in 2009, which provides an alternative education program for artists and other arts professionals, as well as an international residency and public program series.

Exhibition and gathering spaces, most located in the neighborhoods of Old San Juan, Río Piedras, and Santurce, have provided an essential outlet for artists and created a sense of community. Diagonal, El Lobi, El Local, Km 0.2, Hidrante, Taller Malaquita, Souvenir 154, La Casa de los Contrafuertes, Clandestino 787, Taller Secreto, and Recinto Cerra are among the most important venues to emerge over the past decade. The now closed Estación Espacial, Zawahra Alejandro, La 15, Espacio 20/20, Mondo Bizarro, La Loseta, and La Productora also fostered Puerto Rican artists at the grassroots level. These organizations range from shared studio spaces to galleries attached to bars or cafés to relatively professional institutions with curatorial agendas and an international profile. In a small place where careers in the professional art world can only progress so far and the preferred escape valve has always been migration to the US, such institutions provide an incentive to stay on the island. In the aftermath of the hurricane, some of these same spaces also provided ad-hoc assistance to their immediate communities and even organized relief brigades that traveled throughout the island.

TO SAY THAT last year’s Hurricane Maria disrupted the frail equilibrium of the art scene would be a massive understatement. On the institutional front, damages to the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, which owns historical buildings and collections ranging from archeological artifacts to contemporary art, have not been officially revealed. Over the past few years, the budget has been progressively cut, leaving barely enough cash to cover basic operating costs, but not enough to program its gallery spaces. It was recently announced that the much anticipated National Exhibition will open later this year, but the organizing body has not issued an official statement about the plans for the fifth edition of the San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial. This lack of accountability and transparency is a disappointment to the arts community.

More important, Puerto Ricans are still reeling from the official report, released only in August, that nearly three thousand people died in the storm. The mental stability of a whole country has been thrown out of whack. Darkness, literal and metaphorical, enveloped Puerto Rico. Shady deals were struck to provide emergency supplies and services, Donald Trump threw paper towels to people in a shelter, and Congress denied any kind of debt relief, offering more loans instead. Even as most of the population remains vulnerable, a textbook implementation of disaster capitalism, to borrow activist Naomi Klein’s term, is well under way. The shock of the storm has, if anything, accelerated the Junta’s plans to transform Puerto Rico into a tax haven—high-profile cryptocurrency hucksters like Brock Pierce have already moved here—and to advance the visitor economy.

The term “visitor economy” denotes the economic activity— goods consumed and services rendered—by people who visit a place. Prioritizing the visitor economy can affect practically all aspects of life, transforming a society to serve the visitor. Hospitals can be medical tourism destinations, and university systems can be geared toward foreign students paying high tuition. A vibrant art scene can make a place a “great destination,” creating a permanent performance of culture and nationality in which spectacle is encouraged and the long-term sustainability of the artistic community is mostly neglected. For Puerto Ricans, all this prompts the question, whose idea of paradise are we building? Are we even expected to stick around?

Two recent exhibitions exemplify this dichotomy: “Contemporánea Internacional. Nuevos coleccionistas en Puerto Rico” at MAPR, and “Entredichos” (In Question) at MAC. “Contemporánea Internacional”, which opened in July and is the first post-hurricane show at MAPR, offers a selection of works from seven local collections. According to an exhibition wall text, the show aims “to facilitate the enjoyment of contemporary art for all audiences, reaffirming its mission to make art from Puerto Rico and the world accessible.” Organized by MAPR chief curator Juan Carlos López Quintero, the presentation is messy, providing few clues as to why it matters that these works are being shown together at all. Regardless of the merit of the works—which are mostly by international artists, including Martin Kippenberger, Maurizio Cattelan, Ana Mendieta, Neo Rauch, Cindy Sherman, and Anish Kapoor, as well as well-regarded Puerto Rican artists such as Jesús “Bubu” Negrón, Gamaliel Rodríguez, and the lone local female artist, Dhara Rivera—the exhibition misses the mark by fostering the illusion of normalcy. A display of things devoid of serious ideas, “Contemporánea Internacional” seems to come out of a need to present an aspirational, celebratory, albeit empty grin to the visiting public. Everything is all right, please come again.

In contrast, “Entredichos” was organized less than three months after the hurricane. The accompanying text, by director Marianne Ramírez Aponte, reads like a statement of purpose for the institution. She stresses the need for museums to be aware of the values, structures, and practices that they legitimize. The museum’s role as facilitator of experiences and images, Ramírez Aponte argues, determines how art is consumed in Puerto Rico and who has access to it. Socially engaged institutions should offer a glimpse of “the best goals for social development for Puerto Rico, taking always into account our island’s and our people’s dignity, and in dialogue with the rest of the world.”³ The exhibition featured a selection of recently acquired work by Puerto Rican artists who address the territory’s history of social and political struggle.

A representative project was Pablo Delano’s Museum of the Old Colony (2015–17), an installation comprising archival photographs and films of Puerto Rico, most of which were created by US photographers and filmmakers to represent life in the territory to US audiences. Delano’s juxtapositions of different images—depicting alluring landscapes, agricultural laborers, interactions between American colonists and “natives,” and triumphant military parades—suggest the colonial attitudes, racism, and “othering” implicit in the films and photographs. Though much of Delano’s source materials date to the early twentieth century, the attitudes they embody remain prevalent, with PROMESA providing a stark clarification of the uneven relationship provided by Puerto Rico’s “commonwealth” status.

The values Ramírez Aponte invokes in her curatorial statement were manifest as the museum became a hub for artists’ recovery after the storm. As part of their “MAC in the Barrio” initiative, a program to combine art classes with social services for San Juan’s poorest, the museum served as a collection and distribution site for foodstuffs and other essentials, ran a school program that replaced lost school days with activities in the museum, created a psychological support and art therapy program, offered assistance for those artists completing applications for grants, and aided in the rescue and conservation of artworks.

These efforts complemented those of smaller arts organizations. Beta-Local was able to secure over $350,000 from US–based nonprofits and individual donors for El Serrucho (The Handsaw), a post–Maria emergency fund for artists and cultural workers. Through a regranting process, applicants were able to receive up to $10,000 to mitigate lost income, property, materials, and works, as well as to subsidize new projects. Existing collaborative projects also turned toward emergency efforts. Escuela de Oficios (Trade School), for example, a project organized by artist Jorge González that supports artisans and organizes workshops around the island, sprang into action to help its collaborators return to their work with traditional craft techniques. Scholars and students in the diaspora have also been instrumental in channeling institutional support back to Puerto Rico. Numerous universities temporarily received Puerto Rican undergrads, and some summer fellowships were granted at New York University and Princeton. In a show of solidarity, a number of artist residencies held specific open calls for Puerto Rican artists.

IS A CRISIS still a crisis when it’s the permanent state of living? Many in Puerto Rico’s art community rallied to secure an emergency safety net and provide mutual aid, but more than a year after the storm, the issue of sustained support for the arts community is as relevant as ever. Recently, Northwestern University’s performance studies program put in place a two-year professionalization program in collaboration with MAC. The university is also sponsoring a residency program called La Espectacular at the independent San Juan art space Diagonal. Confronted with the progressive dismantling of the state, residents are finding power in self-organizing, but the necessity for seed money remains. To mitigate this, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the composer of the musical Hamilton, recently established Flamboyán Arts Fund and announced its multiyear project to support the cultural sector beyond the immediate relief effort.

Individual artists, meanwhile, have returned to their daily lives. Puerto Rico has always had advertising campaigns—whether by banks, beer companies, or the tourism board—that seem to stoke the population’s self-esteem, invoking pride in national achievements and highlighting the island’s natural beauty. Lately, popular culture has been flooded with feel-good motivational phrases that encourage Puerto Ricans to power through the crisis. Eye rolls and ironic laughs abound whenever popular phrases like “Puerto Rico se levanta” (Puerto Rico rises) or “Yo no me quito” (I don’t quit)—the latter officially copyrighted by a car dealership some years ago to boost morale among its employees—are heard in the media or seen on a t-shirt. For some people, these phrases, however corny, provide real motivation and a sense of purpose. A more accepted positive note was sounded by Puerto Rican trap sensation Bad Bunny, whose song “Estamos bien” became a mantra for the summer. Are we really doing well, though?

Among the artists who have addressed this question is Rafael Vargas Bernard, a noise musician, performer, and visual artist who creates installations and interactive sound sculptures, programs robots to draw for him, and uses sensors that transform colors into sound. At a moment when the hurricane damages seemed overwhelming and the weather images too abstract, Vargas Bernard created a series of robotic drawings that feature schematic maps of Puerto Rico with Maria’s trajectory drawn on top. Interactive “synth sticks” of his own design respond to the colors he used on these maps, producing an array of dissonant sounds. The piece Se voló la puerta and everyone could see inside (The door blew off and everyone could see inside), 2017, consists of a broken door hanging from the ceiling. By embedding speaker parts that vibrate according to the speed and direction in which it is swung, the door itself becomes a speaker blaring sounds reminiscent of wind gusts. Recordings made during the storm were used as reference to design the algorithm that generates the sounds.

For many artists, daily life post–Maria means work in the hospitality industry. As the impact of international media and tourism grows, there is an increasing awareness of how Puerto Ricans are looked at by visitors. Writer and illustrator Mariela Pabón’s hilarious zine Turistas includes cartoon depictions of cringe-worthy interactions with American tourists that she experienced during her front desk shifts at an Old San Juan boutique hotel. “Here’s my credit card, please don’t steal it,” says one woman. “You Puerto Ricans are so colorful,” declares another. José López Serra—a photographer who runs the gallery Hidrante in Santurce, the first art space in the city to reopen after the hurricane—went to great lengths to photograph the aftermath of the hurricane, all while holding a day job at another hotel’s front desk. The series was published by Independent Curators International.

Artist and Beta-Local codirector Sofía Gallisá Muriente told me in a recent email exchange that, in the context of permanent crisis, the drive toward “decolonization forces an engagement with media beyond a subservience to the outside gaze.”⁴ Some of her work is directly related to the aesthetics, ideology, and impact of the tourism industry. Created before the hurricane, her video B-roll (2017) comprises promotional material that the García Padilla administration used to attract American investors to Puerto Rico. This extra footage is usually used to enrich storytelling and give editors flexibility in constructing a project. By focusing only on the B-roll, the artist emphasizes the visual tropes recurrent in this type of marketing of the Caribbean. A drone camera glides over the land, surveilling and making it simultaneously photographable, marketable, and controllable. These are the views of paradise future investors would enjoy on their own helicopter trips. Techno music contributed by a local DJ, Daniel Montes, accompanies audio from the interviews in the unseen A-roll, as well as recordings of investors who moved to Puerto Rico to avoid paying US federal taxes, which the artist herself made while attending the Puerto Rico Investment Summit in 2016. It’s clear the visualization of spaces is key to possessing them, and the underlying idea of “development by invitation” of the 1950s has changed very little in the colony.

In a similar vein, while on a residency immediately after the hurricane, Roberto “Yiyo” Tirado started experimenting with drone footage of Puerto Rican cities that showed numerous houses roofed with blue tarps. In a developing body of work that includes painting, photography, and digital imagery, he has explored the inherent power and multivalent associations of the color blue, juxtaposing depictions of the tarps used to cover roofless homes with stereotypical images of the Caribbean skies, beaches, and resort pools.

The relationship between memory, awareness, and the physical state of the island after the hurricane is key to understanding life post–Maria. López Bauzá recently published a book that had long been in development: El resplandor de Luzbella (The Glow of Luzbella), an allegory of Puerto Rico, tells the story of a journalist sent to interview the president of Luzbella, a mysterious island in the Atlantic. Rumors abound about the country’s perceived economic prosperity and political stability, yet very little is known about the place. How has it managed to stay hidden for so long? His novel presents an alternate reality for the “sinking colony” described on his blog, providing a roadmap for how we could be living in a more just, equitable society—exactly what we want to build after Maria. 

Endnotes

1. All translations by the author unless otherwise noted. Juan López Bauzá, “Día segundo de la tormenta económica,” A Pique, May 4, 2016, jlopezbauza.wordpress.com.

2. See Simon Davis-Cohen, “Meet the Legal Theorists Behind the Financial Takeover of Puerto Rico,” The Nation, Oct. 30, 2017, thenation.com.

3. Marianne Ramírez Aponte, “Entredichos,” exhibition text, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, 2018.

4. Sofía Gallisá Muriente, email to the author, May 25, 2017.