Exhibition from March 1st till May 31st, 2019
Puerto Rico: Interior/Exterior is an invitation to contemporary Puerto Rican artists, to help us understand the complex relationship between the mainland United States and the island of Puerto Rico. All of the artists in this exhibition share two things: they are native to Puerto Rico and they cherish and value art-as-social-discourse. The exhibition was Co-Curated by David Attyah and Ricardo Rodríguez
Almost every artist in this exhibition was making work about deteriorating US/ Puerto Rico economic and social relations before climate disaster changed the lives of everyone on the island. Their views overlap and diverge, as the artists range in age, race, gender, sexual orientation, and cultural status, and think in visual media as diverse as fabric, video, printmaking, and figurative painting.
The purpose of this exhibition is three-fold: first, it is a method of thinking about identity, diversity, inclusion, economic growth, responsibility, recovery, and fairness, as it impacts Puerto Rico. Second, the exhibition illustrates how artists think through culture and politics and examine what can be articulated with images and things beyond words. And third, the exhibit also calls into being a world where there isn’t any “in” or “out” in the face of suffering, even as it questions the unbalanced relations between territories.
To see a video of the opening event go here.
