Puerto Rico notes: Part 2 – Artist studios and art museums
During my recent visit to Puerto Rico, I also had the opportunity to visit several artist’s studios, the most memorable of which was our visit to the studio of the celebrated artist Antonio Martorell in an old warehouse district in the Playa de Ponce. Ponce is Puerto Rico’s second city and is located on the island’s Caribbean coast.
It is a working studio where Martorell works with a team of assistants to produce and manage his work, and which includes living quarters. Visiting Martorell’s Ponce studio is also a fantastic journey into the rabbit hole of the creative imagination. The space is jampacked with work by other artists; antiques and collectibles; large, fantastic papier-maché vejigante masks from the Ponce masquerade; many, many books; and a most impressive collection of hats; along with examples of Martorell’s own work, with delightful surprises to be found in every nook and cranny.
It was Martorell who first took me to Ponce, while I was on a research visit in Puerto Rico in 1996. He had just acquired his studio space at that time and spoke animatedly about his plans for what was then still a large, bare space. This made it doubly interesting to see what it has become, more than 25 years later, as what is now arguably a work of art that exceeds Martorell’s other work in scale and complexity and that is, in many ways, his ultimate self-portrait.
Martorell, who remains remarkably active as an artist at age 83, appeared to be indifferent about what will happen to his Ponce studio after he passes, stating that he left that responsibility to the next generation. It would surely be a great loss to the Puerto Rican art world if the exceptional space he has created was not preserved as a museum to his work and vision. As we know all too well in Jamaica, artistic legacies are fragile and art-historical memories can be very short and selective, unless they are proactively documented and maintained.
Antonio Martorell was also the one who took me on my first visit to the Museo de Arte de Ponce, which was then the private art museum of the Puerto Rican politician, industrialist, and art collector Luis A. Ferré (1904-2003). The museum collection consists mainly of European art from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and is best known for its Pre-Raphaelite holdings, but also includes Puerto Rican and other Caribbean art. The museum first opened in 1959, in a colonial mansion in the historical part of Ponce, and moved to its present location in 1965, a modernist building designed by Edward Durrell Stone, one of the two architects of the original MoMA building in New York City.
The Ponce Art Museum closed for a restoration and expansion in 2008, with an annex building and a large courtyard for events added and reopened in 2010. I had the opportunity to visit it a second time when I was invited to speak at the Association of Art Museum Directors meeting at the museum in 2011. The building and permanent exhibitions, which included an expanded Puerto Rican section and judicious curatorial interventions into the historical collection, looked spectacular and had been completely transformed, while doing justice to the original architectural design.
The Durrell Stone building was damaged in the earthquake swarm that hit southern Puerto Rico between December 2019 and January 2020, which included several strong shocks. It is presently closed to the public. The museum is now embarking on its rehabilitation, but we were able to visit the it’s impressive, state-of-the-art conservation lab and storage facilities in the annex, which set a standard which is not surpassed anywhere else in the region. Urgent art conservation needs exist throughout the Caribbean region, affecting museums and corporate and private collections alike, but it is only in the Spanish-speaking islands that conservation facilities of any substance exist. While somewhat smaller than Jamaica, Puerto Rico has more art museums than all the Anglophone Caribbean combined. Most of these are concentrated in San Juan.
I also visited the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC PR) in the Santurce district there. Established as an artist-initiative in 1984, MAC PR is, to my knowledge, the only art museum in the Caribbean that is exclusively dedicated to contemporary art, and it has collections from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The museum is currently located in a converted school building from circa 1900 and, in an inspired combination of historical and contemporary architecture, the central courtyard has been covered with a translucent suspended roof, which brings light and air into the courtyard but turns it into a useable covered space for events and gatherings. I saw the powerfully moving Novenerio exhibition there, which explored various creative responses by Puerto Rican artists to historical and present-day experiences of loss and mourning, from the political events that have shaped modern Puerto Rico to Hurricane Maria and the pandemic.
And, finally, I also had the opportunity to visit the Fundación Cortés in Old San Juan. The foundation manages the art collection of the Cortés family, which is associated with the popular Cortés chocolate brand (which uses cacao from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico). The collection consists of Puerto Rican and other Caribbean art, including Jamaican artists such as Roy Reid, Everald Brown and Andrea Chung, which was a very pleasant surprise as there are not many private or corporate collections with a Caribbean-wide scope in the region. The foundation operates two gallery spaces at its Old San Juan headquarters (located above the popular Chocobar chocolate-themed café and restaurant) and has an active community art education programme.
While it appears that private initiative is quite well-developed in the Puerto Rican art world, despite the recent challenges, state-run institutions are not all faring so well, hamstrung by the recent austerity measures and, I gather, a stifling combination of bureaucratic inertia and governmental and art world politics – an unfortunate dynamic we are, also, all too familiar with here in Jamaica. The National Gallery of Puerto Rico, which is part of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, and which holds iconic Puerto Rican art works in its collection, has been controversially closed since 2013. And the award-winning San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial, the successor of the San Juan Biennial of Latin American and Caribbean Engraving (1970-2001), has not been held since 2016.
Hopefully, as Puerto Rico emerges from its decade-long crisis, these important initiatives will be revived and once again become part of Puerto Rico’s ambitious and diverse art ecology. The remarkable resilience of the Puerto Rican art world indeed reminds us that the arts can, and indeed must thrive in times of crisis and can, furthermore, be mobilized productively to resist oppression, to raise social and cultural consciousness, and to agitate for positive social change.
Note: my column will appear every other week until the end of June, due to workload issues. I will resume weekly columns in July.
Dr Veerle Poupeye is an art historian specialized in art from the Caribbean. She lectures at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, and works as an independent curator, writer, researcher, and cultural consultant. Her personal blog can be found at veerlepoupeye.com.
