This Puerto Rican Sculptor Meets Disaster With Spirit
Watching the coronavirus crisis take hold, Daniel Lind-Ramos, a powerful storyteller, filled notebooks with carnival, medical and spiritual imagery.
By Siddhartha Mitter
April 1, 2020
For the artist Daniel Lind-Ramos, a local hero in Puerto Rico whose altarlike assemblage sculptures of everyday objects have belatedly found acclaim on the mainland, the past month was to have been a celebration of his new visibility, which began with last year’s Whitney Biennial.
In early March, his first New York solo exhibition opened at Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea. Then he flew to Florida to receive the $50,000 Pérez Prize from the Pérez Art Museum Miami. He returned to New York to be close to his exhibition, visit with colleagues and friends, and be available for collectors and the news media.
Days later, the coronavirus crisis shut everything down. (The gallery, open by appointment, has posted the exhibition online at marlboroughgallery.com).
Until he made it back to Puerto Rico this week, Mr. Lind-Ramos, 66, whiled away the month the way many of us did: Alone in a rental in East Harlem, making tactical runs to the supermarket, watching movies, following the calamity by the sound of the sirens and the horrific dispatches online.
And sketching.
“We have to take everything that is within our reach to create images,” Mr. Lind-Ramos said. “I’m not in my studio, but I have paper, pens, pencils. So I can react to the situation.”
Disaster, in some ways, is familiar terrain.
Consider the history of marginalization faced by black Puerto Ricans — Afrodescendientes, as they are known — who make up communities like his own, Loíza, where he was born and works to this day. Consider Puerto Rico’s past decade of financial crisis and austerity, overseen by a Washington-imposed board, that has demolished incomes and unraveled the economy.
And consider Hurricane Maria, a natural disaster compounded by government failure, that devastated the island in September 2017, leaving an official death toll of nearly 3,000 and collapsing the infrastructure to the point that it took nearly a year to restore electricity completely.
“It was bad,” Mr. Lind-Ramos said. “Maria, forget it. It destroyed everything.”
But crisis also shakes up the visual language, the system of signs, as familiar objects or even colors take on enhanced meanings, while others spring from nowhere to take center stage.
The prevailing energy in Mr. Lind-Ramos’s assemblages is vibrant, even joyous. They incorporate coconuts and palm fronds and basketballs and gloved hands that stick out to strike drums and tambourines. There is a proletarian humor in his juxtapositions of an old television, heirloom skillets or a glass food-display case with jute fabric and tropical plant debris.
When the bright blue tarps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency covered punctured roofs across the island, Mr. Lind-Ramos worked them in as well. A FEMA tarp forms the vivid vestment of his “María, María,” an object-rendering of the Virgin Mary that also plays on the hurricane’s name, and that appeared in the biennial. (The Whitney later acquired the piece.)
“Where you find objects related to catastrophe, you can create images,” Mr. Lind-Ramos said. “Because there’s a history there, not only in terms of where the object comes from, but a history related to the consequence of the catastrophe.”
“So you can create images that are not that complicated to build — but that doesn’t mean that they won’t be strong and won’t reach a lot of people. There’s a big power there.”
For years, the power of Mr. Lind-Ramos’s work was closely held in community — in his hometown, and in the network of artists on the island, many of whom he taught over the years, first as a high school teacher, then as a professor at the University of Puerto Rico. “That commands an enormous amount of respect,” said Marina Reyes Franco, a curator at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico. “And the stories that he chooses to tell are very rooted.”
Mr. Lind-Ramos has spent his whole life in Loíza, aside from the time spent earning his master’s degree at New York University in 1980 and a fellowship year spent in Paris in 1989. In the town, on the coast east of San Juan, the borders are porous between his home, his studio and the world of his family and friends, as Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta, the curators of the 2019 Whitney Biennial, found when they visited him in early 2018.
“We were in the orbit of his life,” Ms. Hockley said. “We saw the work, we went for a walk in the neighborhood, everyone said hi to him — this is his aunt, this is his cousin, that’s his friend he’s known since he was a kid. All these people were just around, and that was lovely.”
Loíza carries a specific history within Puerto Rico. It is a majority black town with an Afro-Caribbean culture that makes it kindred to Trinidad, Haiti or New Orleans; where the veneration of the orishas, divinities drawn from Yoruba religion, continues, and where the percussive musical genre bomba was possibly born and certainly flourished.
The British Navy was moored off Loíza when it attacked Spanish-held Puerto Rico in 1797. Black militias were instrumental in repelling the invaders, a role some scholars argue was silenced in historiography, diminishing the role of black Puerto Ricans in the island’s narrative. But in Loíza it is part of cultural memory, and many of Mr. Lind-Ramos’s assemblages allude to the battle.
Stalking his work, too, are Puerto Rican vejigantes, festival figures which in Loíza involve outfits and masks made with fronds and coconuts. Mr. Lind-Ramos grew up in a family of artisans; he makes his own masks for the annual Fiestas de Santiago Apóstol and weaves these icons into his art.
His materials come from cooking, building, gardening, celebrating. His old shoes sometimes become part of the work. One new piece centers on a huge grater, used for coconut or cassava, that an elderly neighbor gave him, an heirloom from her grandmother.
The mix of organic and industrial, ancient and anodyne, is by artistic design — “I like that contrast and the tension that it creates,” Mr. Lind-Ramos said. But it reflects a kind of practical authenticity: These are the objects at hand.
Franklin Sirmans, the director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, described Mr. Lind-Ramos as “somebody who comes from a very specific place and manages to make magic that is universal out of that specificity.” He added: “That’s what happens when you have the ability to make sense out of the weird juxtapositions of life that you can see in materials.”
Mr. Lind-Ramos is known for his assemblages, but he trained as a painter and long made figurative work, including portraits of women that took on the differences between Western and African canons of beauty. But exposure to mixed-media art from Africa and the black Caribbean — including Maroon art from Suriname and French Guiana on the coast of South America and the work of Haitian artists such as Edouard Duval-Carrié — pushed him beyond the canvas.
As he sketched in New York, watching the coronavirus crisis take hold, Mr. Lind-Ramos’s notebook filled with carnival characters and their accessories, augmented by medical and hygienic references. Microscopes, sanitizer bottles, but also musical instruments and palm fronds, invoked healing both medical and spiritual. The sketches are blueprints for new sculptures.
He drew Osayín, an orisha who has one leg, one eye, and one ear, and is associated with healing; and La Loca, or the crazy one, a masked character who appears in festival parades, cleaning the space with a brush. In his sketch, she sweeps up little virus particles, with their wheel shape.
As a system of knowledge forged in prior calamities absorbed new information, a visual language for this moment was coming into existence.
“In our communities we find healing in solidarity,” Mr. Lind-Ramos said. “After Maria we did not wait for the government to help us; we decided to help ourselves with what we had.”
The lessons of the pandemic would come in time, in community, he said. “We are still in this world because we still have each other.”
Gods of Disaster: the Hieratic Sculptures of Daniel Lind-Ramos
At Marlborough, New York, the Puerto Rico-based artist builds a new pantheon from the wreckage of colonialism and Hurricane Maria
BY JOSEPH R. WOLIN 31 MAR 2020
In the 2019 Whitney Biennial, a strange figure constructed from rope, burlap, bubble wrap, palm branches, a solar-powered camping lantern, an umbrella frame and brass tacks towered more than two metres high. With a coconut for a head, Maria-Maria (2019) by Daniel Lind-Ramos embodied a tropical goddess, alien and equivocal. The blue FEMA tarp that enveloped her recalled both the Virgin Mary’s mantle and the makeshift dwellings that resulted from the US government’s malignantly inadequate response to Hurricane Maria, which devastated the artist’s native Puerto Rico in 2017. Both protector and destroyer, the commanding Maria-Maria attracted considerable attention for an artist who had hitherto flown mostly under the radar.
In ‘Armario de la Memoria’ (Storage of Memory), 66-year-old Lind-Ramos’s first solo show in the continental US, five of the seven works also resemble abstract, monstrous standing figures. The artist employs an idiosyncratic vocabulary of found everyday materials that includes rough fabrics, corroded agricultural implements and household utensils, musical instruments, sporting equipment and various elements of the coconut palms so ubiquitous to Puerto Rico. While their components evoke working-class Caribbean life in places such as Loíza, the small town where Lind-Ramos was born and still lives, the works themselves conjure individual beings of totemic power and obscure purpose.
Daniel Lind-Ramos, Victorious: 1798 #11, 2017-2020, steel, palm tree branches, dried coconuts, branches, palm tree trunks, wood panels, burlap, concrete blocks, glass, aluminum, fabric, lights , 177.8 × 177.8 × 83.8 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Marlborough, New York/London; photograph: Pierre Le Hors
At almost three metres in height, for example, Figura Emisaria (Emissary Figure, 2020) has a head made from a flat metal crescent, rising above a collar formed of the scalloped ends of palm branches. In place of a torso, a vitrine of glass and brushed aluminium with interior lights – a slick contemporary inclusion in an otherwise hoary ensemble – holds another, smaller vitrine that itself contains a handmade, washboard-shaped grater with a perforated metal surface, perhaps for preparing yuca. The figure recalls, curiously, both a jukebox and Central African Kota reliquary sculptures, but this modern assemblage enshrines a humble object, symbolic of local traditions of sustenance. In their commanding scale and hieratic presence, however, Lind-Ramos’s figures share a closer affinity to the imposing busts of Simone Leigh.
Although the components of his sculptures are as abstract as they are diverse, Lind-Ramos manages to imbue them with a remarkable anthropomorphic specificity, including gender (often fluid) and race. The artist has long drawn from his Afro-Caribbean heritage as well as the history of Loíza, which traces its origins to a settlement of cimarrones, or free black individuals and escaped slaves. The terrific equestrian monument Vencedor #2, 1797 (Victorious #2, 1797, 2017–20), an insect-like warrior on a misbegotten steed, with one booted foot and a blue-painted soup ladle for a tail, commemorates the late-18th-century British invasion of San Juan, repulsed in large part by the bravery of black Puerto Ricans. The gnarled roots still attached to the blocky section of palm trunk that forms the rider’s head even resemble short dreadlocks.
The visible signifiers of black identity in these sculptures, combined with their otherworldly appearance, call to mind the paintings of Afro-Caribbean surrealist Wifredo Lam. Lam’s lanky, hybrid figures, which he summoned in the wake of colonial trauma, compare to Maria-Maria’s post-hurricane manifestation. Appearing in New York just ahead of the catastrophe of COVID-19, Lind-Ramos’s implacable beings now sit in a gallery indefinitely shuttered, like every other gallery and museum in the city. We can only pray the gods are on our side.
Main image: Daniel Lind-Ramos, Con-junto (The Ensemble), 2015, steel, aluminum, nails, metal buckets, paint buckets, casseroles, palm tree branches, dried coconuts, branches, palm tree trunks, wood panels, burlap, machetes, leather, ropes, sequin, awning, plastic ropes, fabric, trumpet, cymbals, speaker, pins, duct tape, 2.9 × 3.0 × 1.2 m. Courtesy: the artist and Marlborough, New York/London; photograph: Pierre Le Hors.
Joseph R. Wolin is a curator and critic based in New York, USA.
https://frieze.com/article/gods-disaster-hieratic-sculptures-daniel-lind-ramos
By SEBASTIAN MELTZ-COLLAZO|Apr 5 2020,
The Visual and Sonic Language of Daniel Lind-Ramos’ “Armario de la Memoria”
The Puerto Rican artist talks about his debut solo show at Marlborough in New York, now on view online.
It’s a rainy Friday the 13th on 25th Street in Chelsea. Most storefronts are closed as the news of a global pandemic’s arrival spreads around the city, but I am here at Marlborough to meet Daniel Lind-Ramos, whose first solo show in New York, Armario de la Memoria (Storage of Memory) has recently opened. He lives and works in Loiza, Puerto Rico, where he also grew up, and the community is intricately connected to his practice. Using objects he finds (or sometimes inherits), he creates large-scale assemblages that allude to events in Caribbean history, traditions, and rituals. After taking part in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Lind-Ramos has since won the NADA Artadia Award, and Perez Art Museum Miami’s Perez Prize. Amidst the pending outbreak in the city, we speak fondly about our memories of Puerto Rico, and the power that lies within remembering together.
You just described the piece as a song.
Yes, a visual song.
I was curious, considering your references and the nature of your work, do you think about how your sculptures sound?
Ah, very good question. When the theme warrants it, I seek to create the visual equivalence to the sonorous aspects. For example, if you look at the sides of the piece it has two little baths. Do you recognize them, the round containers?
Yes! My grandmother told me about how she would go up the river behind her house to fill them with water for bathing.
Exactly! (laughing) Well, I remember my mom giving me a bath in something like that. But when you see it from this side it evokes a musical instrument [used to play] Bomba. And with this sculpture I am thinking about rhythm. Notice the cut of each palm tree trunk I use, as the movement of the rope’s texture sounds like a güiro. But also note that there are variations within the repetition of materials.
Of course, as in the Bomba you have a constant, deep rhythm and a sharp rhythm that is played based on the movements of the person who dances. Improvisation
Well, being from Loíza, I spent a lot of my youth at Bomba dances. I was thinking about the memory of this and how memory lives through these rhythms that you mention.
And that creates an entry point for musicians…
Yes, and I do this with the intention of bringing in those who see this. Perhaps they might have knowledge of the medium like you. But another may have more experience with cooking, and connect with the kitchen elements. Or perhaps they see it as the form of an ancestor if they know about West Indian spirituality. All those references are here. I simply structure them and let the objections evoke meaning. And whoever is present participates with this according to their experiences.
I try to make the surface be felt, the memory of having touched something. I trust that the viewer will activate something in their memory. Because in the end we are human beings with certain essences in common. And those essences are always present, such as the sense of belonging, the familial experience, the feelings that objects carry for each person. I bet on that. I do not have a specific audience in mind because I am interested in exactly how the general public can share within the specificity of my work. In this way I aspire to know ourselves better as human beings. There are more reasons that unite us than the differences we may have. Look at what’s going on with the coronavirus! You can be from any nation right now and you may be experimenting with the consequences of the virus. Because, in essence, there isn’t one person that could fight it more than others.
Your work also has performance and participatory actions as well, what other “materials” are you planning to use for upcoming projects?
I am always thinking of new objects. Whatever appears! I consider whatever I can use to carry a narrative. For “De Loíza a La Loíza” I shaped an assembly of movements as my objects. Something that would involve the community as elements of the composition. I invited musicians, poets, and cooks to perform their actions. Things that I try to present through the sculptures you already see here. And I called up the neighborhood where I have my studio to talk about the topic of food, and I went to interview the coconut supplier, the vendor, the cook… we began to remember together.
So you turned your process around. After bringing objects to your study to make the sculptures, you went out to look for people from the community to be part of the work itself.
Just like that, the same structure! So I summoned the artists and poets to perform their actions inside the house where I grew up and which I have bought to create a cultural space. In this house my interest is to be able to activate these memories, this knowledge in one way or another. I created an assembly with actions instead of objects. In fact, this is a project that I had had in mind for a long time, but the lack of budget and infrastructure on the island made it difficult until only recently.
Something that tends to happen a lot in Puerto Rico for various reasons.
Oh yes! [Both laugh.]
In a video for the Whitney Biennial, you said you didn’t like getting rid of toys and other objects as a kid. When creating these pieces, do you think you are expressing a longing for your childhood?
I would say yes. I confess that regardless of whether we lived in material scarcity, we lived in the abundance of relationships, you know? So it is very possible…
Your wanting to use the objects around you, is it also a message about that material scarcity you just mentioned?
Yes, what I want to also propose is that there is no excuse. In whatever circumstances, you can create and use your imagination to take shape. In this eschatological stage of capitalism I see so much “buy, buy and buy” and then there is so much left over or thrown away. But within what is left over and thrown away I see possibilities, and that is what I propose. I say to people “Hey, relax! Let’s use inventiveness in every sense of the word.” You can work with your circumstances, but if we conform to the structures already imposed, we remain the same, believing the same things, not giving solutions to important problems, and the list goes on. But with my work I try to offer something different with the unity of all [the objects]. With my years of training I am already in a stage of always flowing… and I have done these things without thinking that I would be here, with an important exhibition, or in the Whitney Museum. It is simply that natural urge to express yourself; it is the certainty of being in this experience we call life. And I try, in my point of view, to create visual symbols that speak of that experience. That is what interests me, regardless of the rest. Being in Puerto Rico, I did not know that this would come out of my workshop, I just knew that I wanted to do it.
By: Holland Cotter (May 16, 2019)
“… In a sculpture titled “Maria-Maria,” the Afro-Puerto Rican artist Daniel Lind-Ramos creates, from wood, beads, coconuts and a blue FEMA tarp, a figure that is both the Virgin Mary and personification of the hurricane that devastated the island in 2017. Enshrined in a sixth floor Whitney window, the piece looks presidingly majestic”.
Full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/arts/design/whitney-biennial-review.html
By: Sebastian Smee (May 18, 2019)
…”Some of these artists — I’m thinking of Daniel Lind-Ramos, Marlon Mullen, Nicole Eisenman, Martine Syms, Ragen Moss, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Diane Simpson — are in this biennial. Their work stands out from other good work and vast amounts of dross because it feels urgent and necessary. Its subtleties emerge as you look. It resists being reduced to one-liners and gimmicks and isn’t dependent on wall labels or dissertations. It articulates inchoate feelings, reflecting what is sometimes clear yet more often bewildering about life. And it gains its power, its strange allure, more from what it is than what it’s about.”…
…”The sculptures of Puerto Rico’s Lind-Ramos are as full-throated as Eisenman’s but more formally taut. Made from natural and salvaged materials — from burlap and baseball gloves to plywood and palm trees — they’re both fierce and seductive. One alludes to the trauma of Hurricane Maria, another to the role played by black Puerto Ricans in the colonial era, when local black militias repelled British invasion. These references add depth, but you don’t need to know them to give in to the work’s resplendent aesthetic authority”…
By: Andrew Russeth (May 13, 2019)
“Daniel Lind-Ramos, one of four Puerto Rico–based artists in the show, is a star, using everything from blue tarps distributed by FEMA to coconuts to ropes in service of building uncanny creatures that seem steeped in history.”
Full article: http://www.artnews.com/2019/05/13/whitney-biennial-review/
By: Aruna D’Souza (May 24, 2019)
“…turning the corner, one can find some of the real treasures of the exhibition—sophisticated assemblage-based sculptures by the Puerto Rican artist Daniel Lind-Ramos that align the territory’s past history of colonialist occupation and the looming, post–Hurricane Maria threat of gentrification”.
Full article: http://4columns.org/d-souza-aruna/whitney-biennial-2019?fbclid=IwAR3mi5spqmxcgJhDVbamS6NyjlsCHFz7rRIluGHTlhcApCgXwbtDb4bLsSQ
By: Linda Yablonsky (May 14, 2019)
“If there is a breakout star here it may be Daniel Lind-Ramos, who is in his mid-60s and whose cultural-specific sculpture is better known to citizens of his native Puerto Rico than to those in the US. Centinelas (Sentinel), the more transcendent of two works he has in the show, is an assemblage of found objects that suggests a pipe organ or an altarpiece made of palm branches, burlap, tarps, spoons, a cauldron and rope. They are among the items that washed up near the artist’s home in 2017, after the disastrous Hurricane Maria wrecked the island and killed 3,000 people”.
Full article:https://www.theartnewspaper.com/review/whitney-biennial-2019
By: Scott Indrisek (May 14, 2019)
“One big exception here are inventive sculptures by Puerto Rican artist Daniel Lind-Ramos, who makes magic with palm tree trunks, beads, coconuts, soil, and other poetic objects. As with the best of Nari Ward, a sense of symmetry and gravity give these sculptures a sense of ritual importance, despite their secular materials”.
Full article:https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-amid-controversy-whitney-biennial-plays-safe
By: Murray Whyte (May 23, 2019)
“Curators Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley act as good hosts, convening clusters of artists and works that play well together. On the sixth floor, I felt like an eavesdropper to a simmering revolutionary plan. Daniel Lind-Ramos’s big ramshackle totems, cobbled from burlap, coconut shells, cast-iron pots, and plastic tarps, preside over a meeting of minds between Eddie Arroyo’s dour, roughly painted street scenes of a single building in Miami’s Little Haiti transformed by gentrification, and Gala Porras-Kim’s cool canvases depicting the runes of an ancient, indecipherable language (really: The forms are taken from an untranslatable Epi-Olmec script found on a stone in 1986, now in a museum in Mexico)”.
” There was an energy, a portent — change about to come. I wouldn’t call it threatening, though Lind-Ramos’s “Maria-Maria” isn’t exactly friendly. It’s a virginal idol with a coconut head draped in a gown of blue tarp and named for the hurricane that ravaged his Puerto Rican home in 2017, to the White House’s apparent indifference. But as a grouping it feels unified — complaints registered not with reactive rage, but thought and purpose”.
Full article: https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/art/2019/05/23/whitney-biennial-that-speaks-urgent-whispers/9YuzP4vXFC8Tmjbmdak6aL/story.html
By: Marina Reyes Franco (March 1, 2019)
“WHILE AFRICAN spirituality is a major source of inspiration for many Afro–Puerto Rican artists, others directly address the history of radicalism spurred by dispossession and struggle in the Caribbean. One of the eight artists who participated in “Parenthesis,” Daniel Lind Ramos understands the pervasiveness of racism in Puerto Rico, even if it is obscured by official appeals to Hispanic history. “El que no tiene dinga, tiene mandinga,” he told me.8 The colloquialism implies that everyone has at least some black in them—a slogan often used to invalidate claims of racism. Lind Ramos was raised in Loíza, a center of Afro–Puerto Rican culture. “Surrounded by black people,” he recounted in an interview, “my primary education was full of joy, with traditions, culinary and artistic expressions stemming from an economy based on the coconut palm tree.”
In his work, Lind Ramos often explores the links between Loíza and the African diaspora throughout the Antilles as experienced through carnival characters. Trained as a painter and draughtsman, he began incorporating three-dimensional objects into his canvases in the late 1990s and now creates mostly large-scale installations, assemblages, and videos. The materials he uses, including dried coconuts and palm tree refuse, can be found in the area around his studio in Loíza. His assemblage sculptures often honor construction workers, musicians, cooks, and artisans through the inclusion of their tools, some of which also happen to be important symbols in Afro-Caribbean religions and traditions.
The artist’s 2014 solo exhibition “De Pie”(Standing) at the Museo de las Americas in San Juan featured assemblages that evoke proud and defiant figures from throughout Afro–Puerto Rican history. The imposing piece 1797 features a version of the carnival character El Viejo (Old Man), signified by a metal mask and hat. The abstract figure is surrounded by other masks made of palm tree refuse that are positioned on the wall above an array of knives. Coconut husks are piled on the floor below, some painted with crude versions of the Union Jack. The work is an allusion to militia of Afro–Puerto Ricans who defended the island from a British invasion led by lieutenant-general Ralph Abercromby. The piece also manifests a fierce desire to live in and protect ancestral land.”
Full article: https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/san-juan-afro-caribbean/
2019 Whitney Biennial
By: Chloe Wyma (September, 2019)
“Panetta’s and Hockley’s essays are replete with references to spaces and experiences indexed but invisible in the galleries, such as their visit to the Underground Museum, which organizes art exhibitions and programming like yoga classes and film screenings in the predominantly working-class black and Latinx Los Angeles neighborhood Arlington Heights; or their walk through the hurricane-damaged town of Loíza, Puerto Rico, with local artist Daniel Lind-Ramos, whose queenly figural sculpture Maria-Maria, 2019, draped in a blue FEMA tarp, is gorgeously installed in front of a river-facing window on the museum’s sixth floor. ”
Full article: https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201907/2019-whitney-biennial-80511
The Whitney Biennial: A Tale of Two Exhibitions
By: John Keene (September 4, 2019)
“When an artist belongs to a marginalized community, the act of centering the artist’s hand can have political resonance. In that spirit, the exhibition foregrounded plasticity and craft. Puerto Rico–based Daniel Lind-Ramos’s sculptural assemblages displayed his skillful handiwork, which draws upon African, Indigenous, and European traditions. His Maria-Maria (2019), a sculpture fashioned from coconuts, fabric, and found metal parts, is an abstract depiction of the Virgin Mary (and to these eyes, a magnificent, life-size vulva). Lind-Ramos’s sensitive selection of materials also evokes Hurricane Maria’s catastrophic effects on Puerto Rico, with the titular figure wearing blue robes fashioned from tarps that FEMA distributed across the island. “
Full article: https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/the-whitney-biennial-tale-of-two-exhibitions/
UNA NOTA JUSTO ANTES –O DESPUÉS– DEL FINAL: BIENAL DE WHITNEY 2019
By: Nohora Arrieta Fernández (October 29, 2019)
“Si no fuera por el ventanal inmenso por el que se asoma el Houston, uno pensaría que está delante de uno de aquellos altares diminutos que acostumbran a parapetear las abuelas caribeñas en un rincón del salón o en la cómoda del cuarto. Faltan las imágenes de San Gregorio o Judas Tadeo, y la virgen es quizá un poco grande para las dimensiones de una mesa de noche. María María, del puertorriqueño Daniel Lind-Ramos (1953), mide aproximadamente un metro y medio de alto y fue bellamente ubicada en una esquina con ventana del sexto piso del museo. María, por el huracán que dejó más de tres mil muertos en Puerto Rico; María, por la virgen a la que le rezaron durante esa noche demasiado larga. La escultura está hecha de objetos ensamblados: la túnica es un retazo del plástico azul que la entidad federal de administración de emergencias FEMA (por sus siglas en inglés) usó para cubrir las ruinas de los edificios destruidos durante el huracán. El rostro es un coco que el artista encontró después de una tempestad en las inmediaciones de su casa en Loíza, una pequeña población negra al noreste de la isla. Ramas de cocoteros para sujetar el aura, fragmentos de cuerdas para los cabellos, una licuadora para el torso; el paisaje de Loíza, el ritmo cotidiano, la rutina del paisaje y hasta la brisa que trajo los restos a los pies de Lind-Ramos sobrevuelan en ese rincón desde el que María María gobierna el sexto piso del Whitney”.
Artículo completo: http://artishockrevista.com/2019/10/29/whitney-biennial-2019/
Display Cases: Greg Tate on a Whitney Biennial Haunted by Warren Kanders and Mamie Till
By: Greg Tate (September 6, 2019)
“Porras-Kim shares space with three works by Puerto Rican assemblage artist Daniel Lind-Ramos that obliquely reference in one piece the devastation and abandonment of his homeland wrought by Hurricane Maria and, in another, the legacy of Black resistance to imperialism on the island. A Black woman artist friend thought the tight spatial grouping of Porras-Kim, Lind-Ramos, and vocalist/video artist Laura Ortman tipped toward ghettoization, but it also made her read them positively as a Latinx ensemble. It might not be a bad thing for African-Americans to be repeatedly reminded that the Afro-diasporic histories of post-colonial Caribbean and Latin American folk compel art that does ethnographic contemplation differently”.
Full article: http://www.artnews.com/2019/09/06/whitney-biennial-review-greg-tate/
‘We Ourselves Are Our Prize’: Lasting Works in the Whitney Biennial Evoke Toni Morrison and Ancestry Through the Ages
By: Taylor Renee Aldridge (September 19, 2019)
“As I’ve looked to the Whitney Biennial to think through our unsettled and increasingly fraught sociopolitical and environmental moment, it is clear that artists in the show are seeking out tools from their own beliefs—as well as personal and collective histories—to grapple with the present and find optimism for the future. One methodology centers on memory.
Daniel Lind-Ramos, who offers a poetic assemblage of charged objects, has sourced material from his own community in Puerto Rico to make monumental constructions that reference the complicated and exploitative relationship between the U.S and its island territory in what he has called “an exercise of memory.” In Maria-Maria (2019), he constructed a Virgin Mary figure that resembles a yonic form with a blue tarp that was provided by FEMA to Puerto Ricans after the devastating 2017 hurricane referenced in the work’s title. The tarp suggests the blue robe that often adorns Mary in Christian visual iconography; post-hurricane, it was intended as a structural adornment to take the place of destroyed roofs, but it is of course an inadequate material for protection. Here, Lind-Ramos unifies the world of materials and the world of faith, summoning destruction and protection at once”.
Full article: http://www.artnews.com/2019/09/19/toni-morrison-2019-whitney-biennial/
12 Things Our Critics Are Looking Forward to in 2020
By: HOLLAND COTTER
I’m looking forward to — hoping for — a year in which Latino artists, specifically artists of Latin descent living in the United States and the Caribbean, get their due. Latino art continues to be all but ignored by major museums. It has, for example, virtually no presence in the recent MoMA rehang (which gives significant space to abstraction from South America, a market favorite). There have been flashes of attention. In 2017, “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA,” sponsored by the Getty Foundation, demonstrated the rich history of Chicano art on the West Coast. The 2019 Whitney Biennial included work by five artists, including Daniel Lind-Ramos (above), living and working in Puerto Rico. But what’s needed is sustained institutional follow-up, meaning commitment. I’ll be on the lookout for that in the year, and the decade, ahead.
HOLLAND COTTER
Full Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/31/arts/critics-look-forward-2020.html
Whitney Biennial 2019
by Susan Canning
New York
Whitney Museum of American Art
What a rollercoaster ride it was for the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Although the exhibition included a record number of women and artists of color, initial reception was tepid, with some critics calling it banal and derivative and others saying it wasn’t political enough. Even before the show opened, there were protests organized by Decolonize This Place calling for the resignation of Whitney Board of Trustees member Warren Kanders, whose company, Safariland, produces the tear gas that had been used on the U.S.-Mexico border, at Standing Rock, and against protestors in Baltimore and Ferguson, Illinois, as well as in Palestine, Cairo, the Sudan, and elsewhere. Early on, one artist—Michael Rakowitz—refused to participate. As a way to help deflect criticism, the London-based research collective Forensic Architecture was invited to screen Triple Chaser, their documentary video on Safariland. Despite the protests, which focused the spotlight on the ethical accountability of museums and their boards (in tandem with actions staged by Nan Goldin and PAIN Sackler against Sackler family funding), it seemed that the Whitney Biennial would continue as usual, until three social practice artists, including Hannah Black, called for a boycott in a long essay published in Artforum. The next day, four artists requested their work be removed, followed shortly by four more, including Forensic Architecture. This action created a dilemma for everyone concerned—some of the best pieces in the show were about to be removed, and many other participants, for whom the biennial brought higher visibility and recognition, found themselves in a difficult position. A week later, Kanders and his wife Allison (who was also on the board) resigned, and the eight artists agreed not to remove their work.
The Kanders protest may have pushed the Whitney to deal with its cultural and ethical responsibility, but that was only one of many issues raised through the work of the 75 artists and collectives on view. Clearly the current political situation, along with ongoing concerns about the erosion of democratic systems and human rights, attacks on immigrants, social, racial, and gender inequality, and the very pressing issue of climate change and the environment, shaped the selections made by curators Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta. Their goal of presenting an inclusive and purposeful exhibition was evocatively conveyed by the first work that visitors saw when exiting the elevator: Kota Ezawa’s video National Anthem, an animation of watercolors painted from news footage depicting NFL football players taking the knee as part of the Colin Kaepernick-led protest against police violence aimed at unarmed black men. This poetic, resolute work set the tone for the whole exhibition, a show that invited contemplation, discussion, and debate, with sculpture leading the way.
Daniel Lind-Ramos’s richly metaphorical assemblages, made from materials found near his home in Loiza, Puerto Rico, addressed loss, colonialism, history, and spirituality. The large-scale Maria-Maria, for example, combines a FEMA tarp, coconut lamp, and palm tree trunk, among other things, to suggest both a devotional statue of the Virgin Mary and the destructive hurricane that killed more than 3,000 on his native island. The provocative 1797: Vencedor (1797: Victorious), whose many elements include a machete, tools, and a baseball glove, examined the role played by black Puerto Ricans in thwarting the British invasion of San Juan, a struggle against colonizing political power that, as Lind-Ramos suggests, continues today.
Brian Belott also recycled, fashioning found materials and discarded refuse into frozen objects displayed in industrial refrigerators. Enticing in color and shape yet distant and untouchable, these odd bits of salvage, suspended in a state of cryopreservation, became iconic totems of our throw-away commodity culture. Josh Kline shared a similar focus on the environment in his display of Plexiglas vitrines, each containing a photograph—from the American flag at the Supreme Court and a statue of Ronald Reagan to views of Manhattan architecture and the offices of Twitter—that, slowly filling with colorful murky water, captured the entropy of the present whether it be in sinking cities or political decorum.
Set apart in a white, fluorescent-lit room, Agustina Woodgate’s National Times might have been mistaken for the control room of a factory. Forty working, synchronous analog “slave” clocks interlinked in a grid to one master clock connected to NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and powered by the local utility linked the passing of time to models of economic production based on efficiency and mass labor, exploitation and ownership. Almost Orwellian in its stark depiction of systems of power, National Times was subversively and somewhat poetically undercut by the sly addition of sandpaper to the minute hands of the slave clocks; with every turn, the altered hands scraped and gradually erased the numbers until, no longer able to tell or keep time, the clocks were rendered dysfunctional.
A number of works explored the social politic of the body. In Brendan Fernandes’s performative sculpture, The Master and Form, dancers interacted with scaffolding, holding ballet poses that framed and enacted the body at work. Like Fernandes, Choctaw-Cherokee painter and sculptor Jeffrey Gibson views the body as the site of performance and social narrative. Fashioned out of canvas, beads, cloth, neon-colored ribbons, and teepee poles, his large hangings, suspended banner-like from the ceiling, resembled Native American ceremonial garments. PEOPLE LIKE US evoked the rituals of the Ghost Dancers (who believed peaceful group dancing and spiritual resistance would keep white settlers away), while the two-part STAND YOUR GROUND conjoined references to Trayvon Martin, the Bears Ears National Monument, and queer club culture to envelop us in the gently swaying but insistent dance of confrontational indigeneity.
Forensic Architecture’s videos uncovered the precarious dynamic between bodies and hidden systems of power, focusing on the use of tear gas to control and criminalize the body while robbing it of its ability to breathe or see. Ragen Moss’s transparent plastic sculptures, painted and sometimes filled with objects, vaguely resembled human torsos. Suspended on poles, like so much meat on a rack, these oddly shaped forms intended to represent types such as a miner, driver, author, theologian, and even an ogler, reflecting the many ways that the body navigates through life.
Wangechi Mutu’s Sentinel I and II combined natural elements such as bones, wood, a gourd, quartz stones, and beads with processed materials like paper pulp and concrete to form large standing figures that merged the classical nude with the cloth-wrapped bodies of women from the artist’s native Kenya. Suggesting a protective female body as well as mutant aliens or androids, each sculpture assumed a watchful waiting position, as if standing guard against a hostile, decaying environment. Nearby, Simone Leigh presented her own take on black women’s agency through mixed-media sculptures that combined ceramics, utilitarian vessels, pipes, and heads with eyeless faces to articulate the resistant and restorative healing power of black female subjectivity.
There are many other artists whose works bear exploring in this well-installed exhibition, but leave it to two artists (who were among the first four to request the removal of their work) to convey the complex, diverse, and engaged but subtly subversive narratives at play in this Whitney Biennial. Meriem Bennani’s wild sculptural video kiosks insisted on immersion and connectivity, only functioning when someone sat at a monitor or a button was pushed. When activated, high-definition video collages interwove the stories of Moroccan teens, who attend French schools left over from the colonial past, with social media posts, animation, advertisements, documentary film, and reality TV, humorously misusing clichés of North African culture to explore today’s complex codes of visibility and fractured identity.
Nicole Eisenman’s Procession, a motley group of Brueghelian figures cobbled together in an absurdist fusion of traditional casting and constructivist bricolage (foam, feathers, socks, stickers, and recyclables), seemed both old and new in its evocation of our troubled times. Bending and pulling, toiling and marching, gurgling and farting, this strange and seemingly endless assembly of abject, struggling humans—whether disenfranchised immigrants, the homeless seeking asylum, or the rest of us in the future—trudged and rolled across the patio, confronting the public on every side with their recalcitrant grotesqueness. If, for some, artist activism and protests against museums might seem inappropriate or even detrimental, Eisenman and many other artists in this Whitney Biennial provided an enterprising counter-narrative through work that was resistive, revealing, often curative, and always aware of its social role and responsibility, even if surrounded by the sacrosanct walls of high culture. https://sculpturemagazine.art/whitney-biennial-2019/
Loíza afuera, Loíza adentro: Jack Délano y Daniel Lind Ramos
Nelson Rivera (3 de abril de 2020)
In this life, in this, oh sweet life,
we’re coming in from the cold.
-Bob Marley
En el imaginario artístico puertorriqueño, el pueblo de Loíza se ha constituido en ícono de identidad y de espíritu de resistencia ante el coloniaje. Loíza funciona como una zona de conflicto que opera de variadas maneras, las cuales como es de esperarse en tal situación, no siempre responden a la realidad. Al convertir un lugar en símbolo se corre el riesgo de falsificarlo, tanto por aquellos que no forman parte de la comunidad como por quienes a ella pertenecen, pues también se exponen a mixtificar su espacio vital. Por lo tanto, a la hora de abordar esta visión de Loíza como bastión cultural nacional, no es inútil recordar que toda propuesta artística es, inevitablemente, una más entre muchas otras, y que adscribirle esencias identitarias a un pueblo dificulta dar cuenta de la diversidad que lo constituye.
Loíza es un pueblo costero del norte de Puerto Rico existente desde el siglo XVII, oficialmente fundado en 1719. Por la fortaleza y longevidad de sus tradiciones populares, se le conoce como la “Capital de la tradición”. Es el pueblo puertorriqueño con mayor población afrodescendiente, alrededor de un sesenta y cinco por ciento. El número de artistas puertorriqueños que, a partir de la década del cincuenta, se acercó a la representación de este pueblo y sus tradiciones es considerable, al punto de que en la plástica nacional, Loíza funge como custodia de la esencia de los valores puertorriqueños, espacio casi mítico de preservación de una asediada identidad que reconoce a África como su lugar originario.
En la construcción de una identidad puertorriqueña en el contexto colonial, el reconocimiento de la cultura africana como determinante fue motivo de debate en la primera mitad del siglo veinte por literatos e intelectuales tales como: Antonio S. Pedreira, Luis Palés Matos y Tomás Blanco; y en la segunda mitad, por José Luis González, Isabelo Zenón y Marie Ramos Rosado, entre varios otros. Conocida es la posición de González, en su ensayo “El país de los cuatro pisos” de 1980, sobre la herencia africana como la más pertinente a la hora de definir lo puertorriqueño. Asimismo, esta discusión fundamentó un considerable número de creaciones musicales, coreográficas, teatrales, cinematográficas y plásticas nuestras, sobre todo a partir de la década de los cincuenta.
No obstante, en estos nuevos tiempos en que se nos informa que los asuntos de identidad ya están superados, la presencia de Loíza en el arte puertorriqueño añade otras interrogantes a las ya existentes por más de medio siglo. Al hablar de Loíza: ¿Quién se expresa? ¿Desde qué lugar se opina? ¿Qué autoridad anima tal discurso? ¿Qué aporta, qué revela tal disertación? En más de una ocasión, quien define no es afrodescendiente y su relación con esa comunidad es distante, por lo cual nos preguntamos: ¿Es imprescindible que quien defina pertenezca a ese lugar? ¿Y cómo definimos esa “pertenencia”? ¿Por nacimiento? ¿Por la pigmentación cutánea? ¿Por el estrato social?
Otra de las dificultades más agudas que enfrentamos al adoptar un enfoque esencialista de la cultura afropuertorriqueña es que al insistir en los “valores puros” de una comunidad como Loíza, se desestima su inserción en el mundo que habita. Su espacio se presenta como uno a-histórico, segregado del resto, cual reservación. Se niega su participación en la historia y se le condena a un perenne exotismo que nada tiene que ver con su realidad, en lo que no es más que otro modo de exclusión racista y clasista a la que ya ha estado sometida por siglos. La construcción de un imaginario afropuertorriqueño es, por tanto, una tarea plagada de estimulantes obstáculos. Por ello, y para abordar estas interrogantes, ubicamos creaciones pertinentes en la obra de dos distintos artistas, Jack Délano y Daniel Lind Ramos, cuyas obras inciden en la pregunta que flota sobre una buena parte de la producción artística puertorriqueña, el asunto de quiénes somos y hacia dónde vamos.
Jack Délano nace en 1914 en Ucrania, donde vive hasta los nueve años cuando su familia emigra a Estados Unidos. En Filadelfia se educa como artista gráfico, fotógrafo y músico. En 1941, en su carácter profesional de fotógrafo de la Farm Security Administration, es enviado a Puerto Rico donde permanece tres meses, justo después de un periplo por los estados del sur de Estados Unidos. Es ahí donde enfrenta por primera vez el dramático problema de la segregación racial estadounidense, por lo que el contraste entre esta segregación y la situación de mestizaje que encuentra en Puerto Rico lo llevará a considerar el asunto racial como uno de relevancia a la hora de dar cuenta de la cultura puertorriqueña. A partir de 1946, año en que se establece definitivamente en Puerto Rico junto a su compañera Irene, y hasta su muerte en 1997, su obra acusará un interés particular y constante en la discusión de la herencia africana como fundamental para entender la nación puertorriqueña.
Délano se destaca como fotógrafo, ilustrador, escritor, compositor y cineasta, por lo cual su propuesta afropuertorriqueña no se circunscribe a un medio artístico específico. No obstante, es justo decir que la música es uno de los medios privilegiados por Délano al dar cuenta de nuestra compleja fusión cultural. En su producción musical de los años cincuenta y sesenta, Délano incorpora elementos provenientes de culturas que tradicionalmente se han considerado primordiales al constituir una identidad puertorriqueña. Por ejemplo, en sus composiciones para voz, Délano echa mano de textos de autores puertorriqueños, tales como Tomás Blanco y Luis Palés Matos, junto al romancero español, con su amplia amalgama de poetas árabes, judíos e hispánicos. Musicalmente, Délano incorpora ritmos, armonías y melodías provenientes de las culturas europeas, hispánicas, árabes, judías, sub-saháricas y caribeñas. Su producción musical, vista en su conjunto, resulta en una suma de culturas que bien ejemplifica el sincretismo con que usualmente se ha definido nuestra cultura.
El interés de Délano por la tradición afropuertorriqueña se manifiesta ya en 1956, año en que compone, a petición de la nueva compañía Ballets de San Juan, el ballet La bruja de Loíza. La obra está basada en un cuento popular recogido en Loíza por Ricardo Alegría, y coreografiada por Ana García, directora de la compañía. Este ballet marca un hito en la historia de la danza en Puerto Rico, pues se trata del primer ballet concebido como ballet puertorriqueño. Con ello, se trataba de cumplir con la máxima del dramaturgo Emilio S. Belaval de 1948, esta vez aplicada al ballet clásico: “Algún día de éstos tendremos que unirnos para crear un teatro puertorriqueño, un gran teatro nuestro, donde todo nos pertenezca: el tema, el actor, los motivos decorativos, las ideas, la estética. Existe en cada pueblo una insobornable teatralidad que tiene que ser recreada por sus propios artistas” (Morfi, 370).
En La bruja de Loíza convergen elementos contradictorios que hacen de la misma una obra paradigmática.1 Nos enfrentamos a una coreografía para ballet clásico europeo con una composición musical para una orquesta igualmente europea, pero mestizadas con movimientos tomados de bailes populares y ritmos y melodías de la cultura popular afroantillana. La partitura creada por Délano (quien tuvo, además, a su cargo el diseño de escenografía) inicia con un vigoroso golpe de tambores que anuncia sin equívocos su lugar de proveniencia no–europeo, para entonces dar paso a la orquesta sinfónica en pleno. Délano evade el posible escollo principal de tal pieza, la imitación burda de ritmos populares, arreglados y diluidos para consumo de una élite ajena a tales manifestaciones culturales. En su música, por el contrario, logra una síntesis en la que los elementos populares son reconocibles pero nunca supeditados al lenguaje clásico europeo. Su mayor logro es identificar a Loíza como parte imprescindible de la cultura puertorriqueña, en un momento histórico en que tal identificación era comúnmente inadmisible. Que La bruja de Loíza sea el “primer ballet puertorriqueño” y se haya escogido una comunidad afrodescendiente como protagonista, es un esclarecido intento por hacer más inclusiva una definición cultural y tender puentes entre comunidades tradicionalmente en pugna, para observarse y reconocerse como parte de una misma circunstancia, pero sin eludir las contradicciones entre las mismas.
Estrategia similar observamos en la obertura sinfónica de 1966, La reina Tembandumba, basada en el poema Majestad negra de Luis Palés Matos. A partir de este poema, en el que Palés evoca la presencia de una reina africana, Délano maneja elementos musicales que invocan tanto a las culturas sub-saháricas como aquellas del norte de África; al unirlos a los de Puerto Rico, subraya la presencia de una compleja pluralidad en la constitución de una identidad. Su recurso es una muy occidental orquesta sinfónica, en la que sorpresivamente privilegia al más humilde de los instrumentos, los palitos o la clave, sobre la cual deposita la responsabilidad de cerrar la pieza. Délano lleva la orquesta a una fortísima coda, para entonces silenciarla y dejar solos a los palitos en la nota final.
Como suma de estos intereses, en 1987, Délano estrena su opera magna Burundanga, para orquesta sinfónica, coro y tres solistas. La pieza está basada en el poema de Palés Matos Canción festiva para ser llorada (1929). La elección de Délano de este poema es muy reveladora, pues en él, según su estudiosa Mercedes López-Baralt, “se abrazan las Antillas menores con las mayores, las francesas con las holandesas, las inglesas con las hispanas” (Palés Matos, 42). Palés Matos utiliza aquí el hispánico romance como forma poética, en un poema que celebra la afro-antillanía y en el que privilegia, como una tríada definitoria del Caribe, a tres islas:
Cuba –ñáñigo y bachata–
Haití –vodú y calabaza–
Puerto Rico –burundanga– [119]
El proyecto musical de Délano es cónsono con la poética de Palés Matos. En su presentación sonora del texto, polifacético artista congrega todos los recursos que le ofrece la orquesta sinfónica y las voces de Occidente junto a instrumentos y formas musicales extraídas tanto de Europa como de la complejidad cultural del continente africano y la región antillana. El resultado es una obra difícil de clasificar en el canon occidental, cuya mejor descripción es, precisamente, su título: burundanga.
Una proposición comparable observamos en la producción de las ilustraciones para el libro El traje nuevo del emperador, realizado por Délano en colaboración con su compañera Irene en 1971. Aunque el conocido cuento se desarrolla en la Europa medieval, los Délano transfieren la acción al Viejo San Juan y sus personajes son todos boricuas. Las ilustraciones hacen énfasis en el mestizaje puertorriqueño de dos formas principales: por un lado, los ropajes de los personajes son decorados con estampados y diseños provenientes de Europa, África y Boriquén, en una mezcla de diseños taínos con diseños medievales que lejos de representar un conflicto cultural, ofrece una concordia en la diferencia.2 Por otro lado, los rostros de los personajes revelan toda una amplia gama de colores de piel sin que predomine una. En un guiño a la diversidad, en aquellas escenas en las que aparecen padres e hijos, los Délano presentan a éstos con color de piel distintos.
En el mundo del emperador de este cuento, la pigmentación de la piel no determina la clase social. El emperador es más oscuro que varios de sus sirvientes, por lo cual el color resulta intrascendente al establecer jerarquías sociales. De este modo, los Délano desmitifican la pigmentación de la piel como característica única o definitoria de la experiencia puertorriqueña, para subrayar aquello que les parece más pertinente: las divisiones de clase. El trabajo aparece como el elemento definitorio de los personajes del cuento. Esa misma idea apuntala el ejemplar ensayo fotográfico de Délano, Contrastes: cuatro décadas de cambio y continuidad (1982), en el que presenta a una colectividad puertorriqueña variopinta, cuyas relaciones, armoniosas o contradictorias, se revelan a través del trabajo y las diferencias de clase.
Ciertamente, la propuesta de Délano resulta polémica ante el hecho de que proviene de un extraño a la experiencia loiceña y afrodescendiente. Se hace necesario, entonces, confrontarla a expresiones provenientes de artistas naturales del lugar, para auscultar posibles correspondencias o discrepancias. Para este ejercicio, resulta ejemplar la obra de Daniel Lind Ramos. Nacido en 1953 en Loíza, donde vive y trabaja, Lind Ramos produce un arte firmemente afianzado en su pueblo de origen. Su producción gira en torno a esa zona que, si bien acusa unas condiciones muy particulares, se propone en su arte como microcosmos de la sociedad puertorriqueña en conjunto.
A diferencia de otros creadores, Loíza no aparece en la obra de Lind Ramos como “repositorio de la pureza cultural”, contenedor o protector, cual caja fuerte, de los “nobles valores” de la identidad puertorriqueña. Por el contrario, Loíza se presenta como el lugar que mejor revela las contradicciones y conflictos que afloran en la producción de esa identidad. Por ello, es un espacio que se construye como permeable a todas las influencias que lo puedan asediar, sin considerar ninguna de ellas como ajena. Lejos de presentarnos una zona incontaminada, Lind Ramos posibilita la entrada de todo aquello que pueda poner en peligro su supuesta pureza, ya que aquella se reconoce lo suficientemente fuerte, potente y creativa como para apropiarse de todo lo que el centro le niega sin correr el peligro de corromperse.
El compromiso artístico de Lind Ramos ha sido desde décadas con el muy tradicional arte de la pintura al óleo. Maestro indiscutible de la luz y del color, es este elemento el que distingue su producción de décadas. Sorprendió, empero, su exhibición de noviembre de 2013, en la que mostró cuatro telas de gran formato con dibujos al carboncillo, estrictamente en blanco y negro.3 La eliminación del color favorece, primero, una atención aguda a la estructura formal de la imagen y, segundo, a una mayor concentración en la temática de la misma.
El inusual tamaño de estos dibujos apunta al muralismo, formato que en Puerto Rico no ha gozado de buena fortuna, pues exige un apoyo institucional inexistente. No es de extrañar, entonces, que aquellos artistas puertorriqueños que crean trabajos de aliento muralista en los que celebran la colectividad y su ansia por la independencia, hayan visto sus espacios reducidos a bocetos o miniaturas, como sucede, por ejemplo, con la obra de Carlos Raquel Rivera. Lind Ramos elimina el color y aumenta la escala de sus dibujos como demostración potenciadora de un factible muralismo.
Estos dibujos surgen como consecuencia de eventos reales acontecidos en Loíza. En las pasadas décadas, el pueblo ha estado amenazado por el despojo de las tierras de sus habitantes originarios, para dar paso a la construcción de proyectos vacacionales de alto costo vedados a los propios loiceños. El intento de destrucción de la comunidad tuvo un dramático comienzo en el año 1980, en el que una madre de seis niños, Adolfina Villanueva, fue asesinada por la policía y su esposo herido, para formalizar un desahucio de su tierra y la destrucción de su vivienda en el barrio Tocones. Este crimen quedó impune. Décadas después, reverbera en la conciencia loiceña.
Lind Ramos aborda abiertamente este hecho en sus dibujos. Presenta la lucha de la comunidad desde una perspectiva simultáneamente histórica y mítica, sin que ello represente una contradicción. Se iguala lo militar y lo cultural como dos aspectos de una misma forma de combate. En el dibujo Victoria en Cangrejos, por ejemplo, la victoria es tanto militar como artística. Los arietes que se emplean en la contienda llevan a la cabeza máscaras de vejigantes y la guerra es librada al son de congas y trombones, mientras los artesanos continúan con su labor artística. Con esta imagen, Lind Ramos evoca el Ex-voto del sitio de San Juan por los ingleses de José Campeche, quien en 1797 pintó la misma invasión con un texto adscribiéndole el triunfo de los puertorriqueños “principalmente a la Santísima Virgen N. S. quien…se ha manifestado siempre protectora de los que en urgentes necesidades devotamente la han imbocado” (sic). Tanto en Campeche como en Lind Ramos, el logro es resultado de la íntima unión entre la fuerza terrenal y la mítica. Con estas imágenes, separadas por dos siglos, ambos artistas construyen una épica (visual) fundacional necesaria en el espacio colonial. Característicamente, en la épica de Lind Ramos no se precisa una época: la batalla de 1797 es la misma batalla de 2013, en una deliberada amalgama de tiempos que insiste en la trascendencia de la comunidad y su centenaria resistencia.
En La batalla por Tocones Lind Ramos contextualiza las fiestas populares de Santiago de Loíza al colocar máscaras de caballeros en la maquinaria que aplasta la comunidad, representada por guerreros ataviados con máscaras de vejigantes. Estas máscaras no se muestran por razones de “color folclórico”, sino por su potencial como acoplamiento de lo espiritual con lo histórico. En esta imagen la lucha es consecuencia de la muerte de Adolfina Villanueva, la “Gran Vejiganta”, quien aparece acompañada por una madre y su niño, una figura presa del dolor y un músico que enarbola su güiro cual arma de combate. Estas mismas figuras se observan en la Elegía a la Gran Vejiganta, en la que esta mujer cobra más protagonismo, al igual que los cuatro músicos que la lloran. Las máscaras fungen como respuesta simbólica de la comunidad a los intentos por desaparecerla.
La Apoteosis de la Gran Vejiganta reitera la utilidad de la creación musical como arma de defensa. La obstinada presencia de la bandera de Puerto Rico establece que esta batalla no es la de una comunidad particular aislada, sino la de toda una nación. Lind Ramos señala que la puesta en venta de Loíza a capital extranjero y el trato racista que reciben sus habitantes, en fin, la batalla de Loíza por su sobrevivencia, es la batalla de la nación puertorriqueña toda. Sus dibujos son una urgente advertencia de la necesidad de unidad en la consecución de una liberación colectiva.
Las construcciones que acompañan estas telas son igualmente reveladoras. Son concebidas como altares y, pese a cargar con un peso mítico muy fuerte, Lind Ramos introduce elementos en ellas que lo niegan, en tanto reúne materiales naturales (troncos, pencas, ramas) con herramientas de cocina y de trabajo, además de tecnología digital (vídeo). Lo artesanal y lo industrial, mito y cotidianidad, historia y espiritualidad, ayer y hoy, todo se fusiona. Los tiempos, los trabajos, los materiales se hacen uno, como una sola es la centenaria lucha por la liberación nacional.
En este gran conflicto, el trabajo resulta clave para la liberación. La comunidad se define por su trabajo: su ingeniosa cultura alimentaria, su imaginación musical, su estrecha y respetuosa relación con la naturaleza. Al polemizar la explotación de su comunidad, Lind Ramos destaca las diferencias de clase sobre la pigmentación de la piel. De ahí la pertinencia de mostrar objetos tales como palas, picos y cacerolas, pues la mirada sobre los implementos de trabajo necesariamente apunta a los trabajadores y la lucha por su dignidad.
Yerra, sin embargo, quien considere el arte de Lind Ramos como provinciano, limitado a problemáticas “locales”. Mirar el trabajo –actividad, que según Marx, nos diferencia de los animales– implica mirar la humanidad toda. Esa visión nos inserta en un continuo histórico que necesariamente incluye el quehacer intelectual y artístico. El trabajo de Lind Ramos está afianzado tanto en la experiencia de su comunidad como en las estéticas históricas y contemporáneas. Ni la pintura al óleo ni las construcciones con vídeo son autóctonas de Loíza. Esta es, por tanto, una creación culta, de un excepcional refinamiento, consciente de que honrosamente puede insertarse en los circuitos “internacionales” del arte. Gran arte, en fin, que indiscutiblemente legitima la sentencia de Nilita Vientós Gastón, de 1964:
Todos los grandes escritores y artistas son universales porque son nacionales… Cervantes, Tolstoi, Dostoievski, Balzac, Dickens, Proust, Thomas Mann, Faulkner –para sólo citar algunos grandes novelistas– deben su gloria al hecho de que la intensidad de su visión de lo nacional les llevó a la comprensión de lo universal. Lo nacional no es la negación de lo universal: es el único camino para llegar a él. [113]
La reflexión de Lind Ramos sobre los implementos de trabajo recuerda la decisión tomada por Jack Délano al diseñar la portada de su libro En busca del Maestro Rafael Cordero (1994). A pesar de haber producido una cuantiosa cantidad de ilustraciones para este libro, Délano cedió su portada al retrato del Maestro Cordero pintado por Francisco Oller entre 1890-92. En el mismo, observamos al maestro en clase junto a sus estudiantes de variados colores de piel e, igualmente, la mesa con las herramientas y los materiales que revelan el trabajo que le permite comer al Maestro: el de tabaquero. La elección de Délano para su portada fue la correcta, pues la pintura de Oller, como la obra de Lind Ramos, apunta al trabajo como la actividad que con más claridad define a la colectividad puertorriqueña y su lucha contra la opresión colonial. En ello, nuestros artistas no andan solos. Invoquemos, por tanto, los versos de Juan Antonio Corretjer:
Gloria a esas manos aborígenes porque trabajaban.
Gloria a esas manos negras porque trabajaban.
Gloria a esas manos blancas porque trabajaban.
https://www.80grados.net/loiza-afuera-loiza-adentro-jack-delano-y-daniel-lind-ramos/
Daniel Lind-Ramos
Standing (De Pie) in Loíza
By Lowell Fiet
The accomplished African-Puerto Rican artist Daniel Lind-Ramos paints on canvas with oil, brushes, and spatulas, meticulously blending colors, layering textures, and shaping images. He also works with common cardboard, wire screen, discarded appliances, car parts, the refuse of coconut palm trees, broken musical instruments and used articles of everyday domestic and agricultural labor. Local artisans in his hometown of Loíza, the seat of Puerto Rico’s African cultural heritage, use these materials as well to create the dynamic masks of the characters for the annual Fiestas of Santiago Apóstol.
Lind-Ramos’ mastery as a painter of large canvasses has been established over decades, but he also increasingly innovates through installation, video production and assemblage. He experiments with versions of the Viejo (foolish old man) mask of the Fiestas, which is crafted from cardboard and less defined than the better known coconut-husk Vejigante (trickster-devil) mask, the wire-screen face mask of the dandy-like Caballero (gentleman or knight), or the blackened and made-up face of the cross-dressed Loca (crazy woman). For Lind-Ramos, the Viejo permits broader interpretive possibilities. That practice results in a reconfiguration of his artistic media as a more direct reflection of the social and cultural environment of Loíza, located about 10 miles from San Juan on the island’s northeast coast.
“Majestic” is not a critical term nor does it fully express the design and reach of the assemblages of Daniel Lind-Ramos. Yet the word kept ringing in my head while I walked among the pieces and then after I left De Pie (Standing), an exhibit of newly assembled pieces by Lind-Ramos on the second floor of the Museum of the Americas in the colonial Ballajá Barracks in Old San Juan, from November 23, 2013, through February 2014. The exhibit displayed what I can only call a majestic dance or interplay of local specificities and abstract art, fixed objects and performance, and supposed ethnographic and universal aesthetic elements. It explored a kind of creative pointillism to fill a global map dot by dot, space by space, that counteracts the marginalization of art for reasons of geography, gender, race or belief system.
“Standing” could signify political or cultural resistance or maybe still “standing” after so many years; it could also be “stand” up as command or incentive for reclamation of rights or of what’s owed; or “standing” out, becoming visible against a backdrop of prior invisibility. But it perhaps better communicates the height and structural independence of a solid and firmly rooted base that allows the artist to erect polyvalent totemic forms forged from the natural vegetative refuse and recycled articles of the day-to-day domestic and work environment of the tropical coastal region of Loíza. De Pie reflects four decades of mature creativity, always innovative, experimental and capable of reinventing itself without losing touch with rootedness, as much in the artist’s skilled technical control of his medium as in the sandy earth, the foliage and the social, cultural, and domestic specificities of the African-Puerto Rican community. Lind-Ramos “stands” from Loíza with his shadow pointing toward San Juan, New York, and Paris, where he has studied and worked, and toward the University of Río Piedras-Humacao Campus, where now he teaches; also farther out, toward showings in Senegal, Buenos Aires, Trinidad, Jamaica and Barbados, among others, but always with his feet (pies) like rhizomes firmly planted in the stories of survival and sustenance of the Antilles.
In his written statement about the exhibit, Lind-Ramos refers to “luminosity” and the creation of a “utopia of light” through his art. His workshop in the Colobo sector of Loíza features a large skylight that provides the clarity required to comply with that creative vision. For over more than a decade I have had the privilege of visiting the artist’s workshop and studying his works in various stages of their development. I saw various fragments of the assemblages of De Pie, but I did not foresee the impact of the more massive pieces once they were finished and installed in the rooms and hallways of Ballajá. Assemblages such as the large Armario de la conciencia(Conscience’s Wardrobe) and the slightly smaller Centinelas (Sentries) illuminate the interior spaces they occupy. The two trunks made of palm branches topped by glass cases that frame the hallway in front of the exhibit rooms suggest an extraordinary polysemy that grasps observers’ senses and ignites their curiosity. These structures, composed of recycled and reused objects, demonstrate the plasticity, dimension, complexity, and enlightened flow of creative force seen in works by other internationally known artists such as mask makers Romuald Hazoumé and Calixte Dakpogan of the Republic of Benin, as well as the transformation of common objects into works of uncommon visual beauty demonstrated in the tapestries of El Anatsui of Ghana.
Four large canvasses with charcoal drawings represent more immediately readable imaginaries inside the socio-historical, political and cultural contexts of Loíza. Titled Tocones, Elegía, Costa Serena and Apoteosis, they relate the resistance of the Loíza community through more than three centuries of marginalization and political and economic domination. Here charcoal, without the shaded colors and textures of oil, imprints its raw images and immerses the observer’s imagination in multilayered mythologies: in these drawings indigenous Taínos, free and enslaved Africans, Spaniards, immigrant Irish landowners, Catholics saints, and African belief systems integrate with and transform current tensions created by unemployment, gang, drug, and police violence, and limited economic development to keep a community “standing” on the solid syncretic basis of its African-Hispanic cultural heritage.
I visited Lind-Ramos in his studio in late September 2014 to view an in-progress assemblage of even larger dimensions than those of De Pie. He requested that I not photograph the project in its entirety but did permit photos of clusters of objects. The story of the Fiestas of Santiago Apóstol, its saints, masked characters, music, processions, and their egungun function of calling the ancestors, resides inside its assembled objects and memories. A segment of a new unfinished piece contained a broken trombone slide given to Lind-Ramos by a friend, the Loízan-born jazz great William Cepeda; another part comes from a discarded high school instrument; and the broken horn itself was acquired as junk in Amsterdam. From Loíza the artist recycles the World.
Lowell Fiet teaches Caribbean Drama and Performance at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and directs the Interdisciplinary Studies Program in College of Humanities. He is the author of El teatro puertorriqueño reimaginado: Notas críticas sobre la creación dramática y el performance (Ediciones Callejón, 2004) and Caballeros, Vejigantes, Locas y Viejos: Santiago Apóstol y los performeros afro-puertorriqueños (Terranova Editores, 2007).
https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/book/daniel-lind-ramos
