6 Contemporary Artists Make Waves in Puerto Rico
The island of Puerto Rico is home to many things: swaying leafy palms, dazzling mountains and pristine beaches. There’s also an emerging art scene. While the capital city of San Juan serves as a coveted home base for edgy galleries, the acclaimed Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico is known to host a hotbed of shows alongside artist-led, non-profit spaces including Km 0.2 and El Lobi. Just below, Komos shares a burgeoning crop of emerging and Puerto Rican contemporary artists – and who don’t forget where they came from.
“My work explores in a poetic way the chaotic aspects of the human condition,” says Marta Perez Garcia about her paintings, mixed-media and large-scale pieces. With bold pops of color and repetitive patterns, the artist says she’s been influenced by creatures, nature and metaphorical landscapes. Her work also touches on what she says makes up our “frailty, fragility and strength.”
Perez Garcia’s earlier works – many of which were woodcuts – combine folklore and natural wonders (she was inspired by Haitian art growing up). Women’s narratives are also important. For instance, her Restos-Traces, a series of 19 female toros constructed with handmade paper alongside materials like wire, metal spikes, nails and film negative, explore abuse and brutality, while encouraging us to perhaps see our own lives through her art.
Creating an array of mixed media works – paintings, performance rituals and installations, Chaveli Sifre’s most current work focuses on the healing arts. The artist also looks at the intersections of science, spirituality, smell, botany and medicine. Her mask series, using materials like beeswax and natural found objects like seashells ask us what is hiding beneath.
Through early spring, the edge gallery Embajada (located in Hato Rey Central barrio) hosts a solo exhibit of Silfre’s work, leaning on esoteric symbolism and practices – i.e., smoke cleansing, aura sensing and divination. The artist also sings in a pop band and helms an online magazine dedicated to film and magic. Originally hailing from San Juan, Chaveli Sifre graduated in fine arts.
Born in 1975, Jesús “Bubu” Negrón creates installation, performance and sculptures and is often centered around everyday life. Often, the artist leans on humor, especially when looking at power and authority structures.
Weaving deep folklore and island tradition, Negron, who spent time with craftsmen learning how to create orate Vejigante masks – decorated with sharp fangs and horns, and thought to invoke spirits. The masks are still worn at the Carnival festival and remain part of the island’s history. Negron lives in San Juan, where he’s also part of a grass-roots community organization called Brigada PDT – known for its preservation of history and its people.
In his Plátanos y Machete (2018), the artist Miguel Luciano pairs an old Studebaker pick-up truck with green plátanos (plucked from local Puerto Rican farms) and machete to showcase the first harvest.
Meanwhile, his Plátano Pride, depicts a young Afro-Puerto Rican with a plantain-shaped pendant; suggesting pride as a symbol of his Carribean Latinx culture. And in Double Phantom/EntroP.R (2017) a duo of 50’s Schwinn bicycles kitted out with flags and horns looks at the idea of forward and backward motion. Luciano credits his great uncle, a folk artist, alongside his early outings with Miami graffiti artists, for helping influence his work.
Take one look at Radames Juni Figueroa’s Piña-Melón Fountain (2009) sculpture to see how colonial trade and modern-day travel influenced today’s island life.
And while looking at leisure tourism, the artist also explores Caribbean stereotypes with humor. That’s not all: Figueroa’s Tropical Readymades feature basketballs and sneakers displayed as artworks and reworked as vessels for potted plants – for instance, a marijuana plant with a glow light grows out of a worn sneaker. Of course, this recalls how Western pop culture and sports, alongside the lush island tropics have influenced – and defined– much of Puerto Rico. Working in San Juan, Radames Juni Figueroa was featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennale.
In his most recent work, the artist Omar Velázquez – who’s also a talented musician – touches on music and folklore while exploring typical island aesthetics: leafy flora and fauna, majestic birds and reptiles and string instruments. The paintings all seem to pop with a surreal, slightly Dali-esque quality. Velázquez has said he was influenced by the German painter Max Beckmann and American sculptor H. C. Westermann. The artist’s landscapes also peer at mystical creatures, set in the wake of colonialism and the Puerto Rican diaspora. A few years ago, the MCA Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago hosted a solo exhibit of Velázquez's work.
