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No existe un mundo poshuracan: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria
A penetrating survey of contemporary art from Puerto Rico and the diaspora created since Hurricane Maria
Centering on works made by nearly twenty multigenerational artists from Puerto Rico and the diaspora, this volume responds to numerous contemporary issues affecting Puerto Rico, including Hurricane Maria and its devastation, as well as austerity measures, political unrest, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Included are works across mediums, including painting, video, installation art, performance, and poetry, made between 2017 and 2022. No existe un mundo poshuracán demonstrates ways that these artists have forged a path through adversity, searching for a collective awakening grounded in resistance that disrupts the infrastructure of the colonial design.
Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art
Exhibition Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
(November 23, 2022–April 23, 2023)
Centering on works made by nearly twenty multigenerational artists from Puerto Rico and the diaspora, this volume responds to numerous contemporary issues affecting Puerto Rico, including Hurricane Maria and its devastation, as well as austerity measures, political unrest, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Included are works across mediums, including painting, video, installation art, performance, and poetry, made between 2017 and 2022. No existe un mundo poshuracán demonstrates ways that these artists have forged a path through adversity, searching for a collective awakening grounded in resistance that disrupts the infrastructure of the colonial design.
Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art
Exhibition Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
(November 23, 2022–April 23, 2023)
128 pages, Hardcover
Published January 31, 2023
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November 17, 2022
"Liberty is the ability to exercise sovereignty as a People, to deconstruct the oppressive framework levied against a population, and to elaborate a new political system ensuring the investments necessary to adequately address the inequalities that colonization has produced. Only through a decolonial paradigm can we develop the autonomous solutions needed to dramatically reduce existing imbalances." - Diego Alcalá Laboy
Wow. Not until reading this publication have I encountered an exhibition catalogue that is so revelatory not only in its address on works of art and the artists who make them, but in its inclusion of writing - in criticism AND in creative practice, including screenwriting and poetry - responds incisively to the historical, political, and social conditions that urgently provoke a specific active participation in art practice, which, like protest, becomes a collaborative, durational, and interventionist performance. A collection of essays articulates the continued marginalization of Puerto Rico, its land, its people, and its sovereignty, critiquing systematic processes of disenfranchisement and disinvestment, environmental destruction, privatization, and place-marketing that contribute to the current state of the commonwealth - the term itself pointing to the resonant grips of U.S. colonial policies that continue to force the archipelago into near-crushing dependency. Art provides a vital counterpoint, though the catalogue does not position art simply as a pathway of joy, or love, or celebration; art practice contains these more uplifting modes of expression, coming into existence, after all, as an optimal form of action and participation based in processes, events, and moments of creation, though reflections on individual and collective experiences with art/making "in the wake" develop creativity as a method of healing and mourning, resilience and resistance.
Visually, the catalogue achieves a striking balance among various kinds of content, juxtaposing the traditional black ink on white paper with white text printed onto black paper, perhaps a choice metaphor responding to Puerto Rico's ravaged electric gird, and accentuating the continual coexistence of despair and hope for the island's future, which simultaneously emerges as potentially shadowed and bright.
Wow. Not until reading this publication have I encountered an exhibition catalogue that is so revelatory not only in its address on works of art and the artists who make them, but in its inclusion of writing - in criticism AND in creative practice, including screenwriting and poetry - responds incisively to the historical, political, and social conditions that urgently provoke a specific active participation in art practice, which, like protest, becomes a collaborative, durational, and interventionist performance. A collection of essays articulates the continued marginalization of Puerto Rico, its land, its people, and its sovereignty, critiquing systematic processes of disenfranchisement and disinvestment, environmental destruction, privatization, and place-marketing that contribute to the current state of the commonwealth - the term itself pointing to the resonant grips of U.S. colonial policies that continue to force the archipelago into near-crushing dependency. Art provides a vital counterpoint, though the catalogue does not position art simply as a pathway of joy, or love, or celebration; art practice contains these more uplifting modes of expression, coming into existence, after all, as an optimal form of action and participation based in processes, events, and moments of creation, though reflections on individual and collective experiences with art/making "in the wake" develop creativity as a method of healing and mourning, resilience and resistance.
Visually, the catalogue achieves a striking balance among various kinds of content, juxtaposing the traditional black ink on white paper with white text printed onto black paper, perhaps a choice metaphor responding to Puerto Rico's ravaged electric gird, and accentuating the continual coexistence of despair and hope for the island's future, which simultaneously emerges as potentially shadowed and bright.
Displaying 1 of 1 review