“Stone Yucayeque:” Old San Juan’s 500-Year History on Display at The Clemente
“Carryover (Blue tarp in San Juan)” by Kevin Quiles Bonilla.
*Please note “Stone Yucayeque / El Yucayeque de Piedra” has been extended and will be on view through January 8, 2022. Click here for more information.
The Clemente's current group exhibition, Stone Yucayeque (El Yucayeque de Piedra), includes the works of twenty-eight artists that tell a complicated, yet enthralling story of an iconic and historic place in Borinquen (Puerto Rico): the city of Old San Juan.
The exhibition recognizes the 500 years since the fortified stone city's founding in 1521 by Spanish colonizers and pays homage to the Taínos by using a word from their language, Yucayeque, which means village or city. With work by Puerto Ricans and non-Puerto Rican artists alike, this exhibition is nostalgic, romantic, and, most importantly, political, conveying the complex history of the archipelago of Puerto Rico. Old San Juan is the oldest continuously inhabited post-European contact settlement under US jurisdiction, the second oldest in the entire Western Hemisphere, and located in the oldest colony in the world. As such, the exhibition acknowledges both its current and past history, its place in the land of the Tainos, its culture and people, and the enslaved Africans who built this fortified city.
Curated by Melissa M. Ramos Borges, Irene Esteves Amador, Carlos Ortiz Burgos, and Miguel Trelles Hernández, there is a sense of four vantage points from which to view, interpret and experience the exhibition, along with three converging themes: political resistance, mockery and criticism of the visitor economy, and the environmental ecology of the islet.
The exhibition occupies the two main galleries of the Clemente building. On the ground floor, there is a large woodcut print by Grimaldi Báez titled “Manifest Destiny,” covering the entirety of the wall that welcomes us into the exhibition. Its imagery encapsulates a whirlwind of colonial references, deities, and natural phenomena, setting the stage for the rest of the show, which includes works from the '50s to the present. Masters such as the renowned Lorenzo Homar are shown next to contemporary artists such as performance artist Kevin Quiles Bonilla. Lorenzo Homar's serigraphy Los turistas (1952), next to Kevin Quiles Bonilla's photo documentation “Carryover (Blue tarp in San Juan),” where we see the artist covered in a blue tarp on the ledge of one of the many stoned walls of the fortified city, highlight the discrepancy between the aid provided after Hurricane Maria and the funding aimed to boost the visitors economy. The contrasts between the past and the present are made visible through the curatorial juxtaposition of the works in the space. An eye-opening realization occurs when one realizes how the older works resonate so precisely with the current socio-political climate in Puerto Rico. Has anything changed in the people’s favor?
The selected works include an array of mediums, styles, and techniques for everyone to enjoy and learn about Puerto Rico. The artworks showcased by Bemba P.R. are a series of graphic posters that appropriate political and cultural slogans and imagery to question and dismantle colonial mindsets and structures. They describe themselves as a street art collective focused on transformative political participation through art, offering tools and resources through their platform to all who seek to challenge and democratize formal structures of power.
Another significant body of work sets the stage for understanding the dichotomies on this 500-year milestone. Carlos Raquel Rivera's 1959 lithograph, “Elecciones coloniales,” placed across from the Bemba P.R.'s posters and next to Karlo Ibarra's Desterrados, a conceptual sculpture from 2013-2014, all illustrate the same imagery of colonial oppression and desired liberation.
Also in the ground floor gallery to the left of the entrance, there are a series of twelve abstract pinked-hued overexposed photographs of Puerto Rican landscapes. This series by Tari Berosz questions the Puerto Rican political, socioeconomic state. Titled “La isla invisible,” this poetic piece hides the island’s coordinates in the margins of each photograph. In some cases, the titles of the individual pictures allude to crucial laws and treaties that have marked the history of Puerto Rico affecting the relationships with the land and its people’s wellbeing. As we are drawn closer to this work, we start to sense the buzzing of mosquitoes in the pieces by Frances Gallardo, despite their small size and lack of color. The sound comes from the accumulation of meticulously drawn and cut-out paper of mosquitoes, making those who have experienced a hot and humid day with no breeze come to life—hung delicately on the adjacent wall from Berozsi’s wall-size display. One admires its rhythms and beauty, unaware of the ecological and historical connotations these tiny insects play in the founding of Old San Juan. The story goes that the original city of Puerto Rico, Caparra, founded in 1508, became uninhabitable, among other reasons, because of the number of mosquitos that had plagued the town and Spaniards, forcing them to relocate to the islet of Old San Juan.
On the second-floor gallery, we find ourselves struck by a copper-colored wax-based painting with gold dust by Rogelio Báex-Vega titled “I.D. Tribunal Supremo, Toro y Ferrer, San Juan, P.R. from the series Henry's Myth,” 2021, alluding to architecture, economy, and power. As we look to our right, there is a dark nook showing the video performance by Nicole Soto Rodríguez, “Acto 1, HOTEL NORMANDIE, from the series Abandono.” A powerful poetic-political gesture towards the considerable problem of abandoned structures that once were epicenters of a booming economy, now skeletons of government corruption and mishandled funds. In the same gallery across from that video, Yiyo Tirado's “Souvenir del Verano 2019” is hung close to Alejandro Sánchez Felipe's oil painting “Callejón del Hospital,” 1961. Those works show the streets of Old San Juan in two very distinct manners, both realistic; Tirado's stands out by his striking use of the popular souvenir facades of the city's architecture with the riot markings and slogans that took place in the summer of 2019. A summer where the people of Puerto Rico overthrew the governor.
The majority of the works in the exhibition address in a sarcastic, yet playful manner the ecosystem within the fortified city and the disturbing visitors’ economy model that profits from the misery of its people. I could go on and talk to you about each twenty-eight works in the exhibition but decide to leave you with these as a first taste of what you will see in the galleries. Not only are all the works in the show worthy of mention, but they each tell a unique story and viewpoint into this anniversary's complex, 500-year history.
As I end my visit to The Clemente’s galleries and look into the history of Puerto Rico, I ask myself what other forms of “fortified cities” are “we” building that excludes the most vulnerable?
Sofía Shaula Reeser-del Rio is a Puerto Rican scholar, independent curator, multidisciplinary artist, and educator. Her practice is based between Puerto Rico, Madrid, and NYC. She has organized and produced several major exhibitions with a special focus on Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean artists, particularly supporting LGBTQ and self-identified female artists from Puerto Rico. Sofía has an MFA from the University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain, and a BFA from the Pratt Institute. She also attended the University of Puerto Rico, where she took courses with renowned Puerto Rican visual artists, educators, and academics that shaped and informed her practices.