Recent U.S. exhibition explores complexities of Puerto Rican identity

In a 1928 portrait, a Puerto Rican woman holds a devotional painting of the Virgin Mary and the Child. She looks directly at the viewer, her other hand on her hip. Maybe she was on her way to church. Miguel Pou y Becerra’s work is titled promise. When we look into her eyes, we understand the promise to which P.I. Becerra refers: the broken promise of salvation that was imposed on Puerto Rico through Catholicism during the Spanish colonization of the island. The olive-skinned woman, wearing a plain ocher dress, looks at us with sadness and suspicion, telling us the lies she has endured.

The painting is one of the first things visitors see when entering the 20-piece exhibition “Nostalgia for My Island: Puerto Rican Paintings (1786-1962) at the Ponce Museum of Art” at the Rollins Museum of Art in Orlando, Florida (Valid until January 5). beside promise yes Visions of Saint Philip Beniz (1786), depicts saints, Christ and the Virgin, by José Campeche y Jordán, the first known Puerto Rican artist.

Rollins’s exhibition is one of several recent ones, including “1898: Visual Culture and U.S. Imperialism in the Caribbean and Pacific” at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and “1898: Visual Culture and U.S. Imperialism in the Caribbean and Pacific” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Puerto Rico “Black Puerto Rican” Exhibition Puerto Rico—Puerto Rican identity has been complex, both during the Spanish colonial period and since 1898, the year the United States occupied the island.

“At the end of the 19th century, Puerto Ricans sought to solidify their identity and independence from Spain, and this was reflected, particularly in the politics of the time,” Ponce Art Museum Director Iraida Rodríguez Negron (Iraida Rodriguez Negron) said. Puerto Rico tells art news. “But suddenly there was a huge shift [when the US took over] Not only are we continuing to be under colonial rule, but this is something completely foreign and different. “

These three exhibitions explore island identity as an ongoing process within the realities of ongoing colonization. Rollins’ exhibition weaves the story of Puerto Rican identity over more than 175 years, while NPG’s “1898” is broader in scope, looking at portraits of all U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico Negrx moves this conversation into the 21st century by examining how Puerto Rican identity has been formed from the 1990s to the present day. The exhibitions, which follow the devastating environmental, financial and political blows to the island and its people, aim to examine the island’s current moment through its history and better understand the complexities of identity formation under colonial rule stage.

Changing of the guard

This complexity reached its peak in 1898, when the United States fought a 16-week war with Spain, which ultimately ceded ownership of Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the United States as its empire declined. It was at this moment at the turn of the century that Puerto Rico “went from Spain, a colony of the Spanish Empire, and then suddenly transformed into a completely different culture,” Rodriguez Negron said. How Puerto Rican artists navigated this transition and documented it in their work is an important part of Rollins and NPG’s exhibition.

“People who are not experts, or the general public in the United States, don’t know about this war that was so important to 20th-century American history. It was the war that made this country.” NPG Curator of Painting and Sculpture and Latino Art and History , said Taina Caragol, co-organizer of the “1898” exhibition. art news. “Through the variety of portraits we chose, what we can do is point out the different political beliefs and Puerto Ricans who are trying to empower themselves and their people through various frameworks.”

The NPG exhibition opens with Francisco Oller y Cestero’s 1898 portrait of President William McKinley, in which the former U.S. president wears black in a tight suit and holding a map of Puerto Rico, dated July 18, 1898, the day of the U.S. invasion. His stance demonstrates the strength of a man who believes he has the responsibility of establishing a new order on the island, while his sunken eyes and pale skin give the sitter a sickly, almost vampiric expression that is intensely It clearly shows Ole Sestro’s true emotions towards his new colonists.

The Puerto Rican-focused portion of the show presents a group of portraits of Puerto Rican leaders, including Lola Rodriguez de Tio (1918), an acclaimed poet who Also fought for women’s rights and Puerto Rican independence; young Arturo Schomburg (1896 1903), an Afro-Puerto Rican who studied and advocated for the Afro-Latinx and black experience; Eugenio Maria de Hostos (1903), an advocate for Puerto Rican independence who also believed in the creation of the Antillean Alliance between Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic as a united force against colonization. These three thinkers represent a cross-section of the conversations calling for independence that took place on the island and its diaspora at the turn of the century.

Each representation of these sitters depicts them in a way that helps further their careers. For example, Rodriguez de Tio had short hair and dressed like a Spanish politician, a masculine form of self-presentation that she likely used as a way to be taken seriously as a colonized Women’s Strategies. Small photos of Schomburg also show him wearing a black tuxedo, a sign of social class. These three thinkers largely laid the groundwork for the next generation’s resistance to the new regime, such as the Nationalist Party uprisings in the mid-20th century, setting the stage for the subsequent creation of national symbols of Puerto Rican identity.

Status symbols past and present

Through this new Anglo-Saxon order, Puerto Ricans were determined to affirm a unique national identity, for example by reclaiming the colony Jibarroa term referring to someone from campo (rural) people engaged in traditional agriculture, as a true symbol of Borica.

“This sense of re-emphasis on themselves, this is their attachment to something uniquely Puerto Rican,” Rodriguez Negron said. “This happened even in literature in the 19th century, when they started talking about heroes [jibaro] And how it became a symbol for Puerto Ricans, completely separate from their Spanish identity. “

However, an idealization has developed around this national symbol that often fails to take into account the precarious reality of Jibalo. Oscar Colon Delgado Utuado Countryside (1937), for example, depicts the mulatto Jibarro, who is depicted walking a donkey to drink water amid a lush landscape of rolling green hills and dreamy blue mountains.

This piece is paired with a piece by Marilu Rodriguez Salas mountains/mountains (1959), a semi-abstract misty mountain scene whose blurring may well be a metaphor for how Puerto Ricans began to see themselves as a mixed race of Spanish, Taíno, and African ancestry. However, this portrayal of the concept of “mixed race” has had the effect of erasing dark-skinned Puerto Ricans from the national conversation. “Idealization is more about mixing than explicitly saying we are black,” said Gisela Carbonell, director of the Rawlings Museum of Art.

paradigm shift

By the end of the 20th century, Puerto Ricans began to question these national symbols and think more broadly about what it meant to be Puerto Rican based on their own life experiences. This paradigm shift is key to the “Afro-Puerto Rican” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico, which takes as its starting point the 1996 exhibition “Paréntesis: ocho Artistas negros contemporáneos” (Parentheses: Eight Black Contemporary Artists) held at the Institute of San Juan Ann’s Puerto Rican culture.

“It’s important that the artists organized this exhibition themselves, and that they were responding to other, more official exhibitions and publications that wanted to talk about what they called the African presence in Puerto Rico, or the third aspect of Puerto Rican identity. section, but none of this has been mentioned before,” Marina Reyes Franco, co-curator of “Puerto Rico Negrx,” told us. art news Exhibition in 1996.

Ramon Brelling’s three friends (1996), which opened the recent MAC exhibition, depicts the three powers that control life in Puerto Rico: banks, church, and government. Bankers, bishops and politicians sat side by side in a tense press conference, in which the latter raised his arms aggressively as he spoke into a set of microphones.

made centuries later Visions of Saint Philip Beniz Like McKinley’s portrait, Brelling’s painting is in many ways a harbinger of today’s Puerto Rico. In identifying rulers, we can question what has been lost and how Puerto Ricans can regain it. Kivan Quinones Karakol phone number 1-5 (2021), a set of sculptures using conch shells as landlines, offers a portal back into our ancestral past, asking Puerto Ricans to return the call to our roots. By doing this, we can reclaim space and stolen space. Esteban Valdés’ 1967 textual work expresses this succinctly: Puerto Rico Para Los Puertorrisueños (a pun on the Spanish word for dreams).

However, there are subtleties and complexities in these recycling efforts. Deianella Maldonado 1996 Raise your hand to speak (Raise Hands to Speak) shows an Afro-Puerto Rican man wearing a large mask raising his hands. He was also asking these important questions about Puerto Rico, but he still felt he had to be given a voice—there was still a lot of work to be done on decolonization.

“To me, they’re all saying, yes,” said María Elena Ortiz, curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth and another co-curator of the exhibition. Puerto Rico has had experiences with racism, and many of us have had that experience.” [and] We are taught to deny – and to me, that basic acknowledgment in public is very powerful. “

Carbonell said Puerto Ricans have expressed their identity in many ways over the past long century, although they often tend to “defend their identity and criticize the injustices that are happening.” “Maybe some of them, especially the early ones, will be surprised by how things turned out, [how] What it means to be Puerto Rican can be described or characterized in different ways. “