PUERTO RICAN ABSTRACTION REVISITED AT THE MAC

The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC) opened Diasporican Abstraction: Identities Beyond Representation to the public in September. A curatorial project by Abdiel D. Segarra Ríos, the exhibition occupies all of the museum’s galleries and brings together more than fifty artists and collectives from different generations and geographies.

Through painting, sculpture, installation, photography, performance, and other languages, the show brings together works created in and outside Puerto Rico. It reconsiders the history of Puerto Rican abstraction through the experiences of diaspora, migration, and cultural exchange. It includes works from the collection of El Museo del Barrio in New York, in dialogue with pieces from the MAC’s Permanent Collection and loans from private collections.

For Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, a Venezuelan-British art historian and curator, “abstraction is not defined in terms of the outdated opposition between realism and figuration. It cannot be reduced to a generic or uniform idea of an artistic language devoid of context, agency, and content.” In the particular case of the Puerto Rican experience, abstraction functions as a necessary fissure in a narrative built on an uneven struggle between assertions and certainties. The artists who have committed to abstraction have insisted on defending a cultural gap that does not rest on geopolitical paradigms of identity, but rather on one that makes room for a more diverse and plural range of interlocutors.

Diasporican Abstraction: Identities Beyond Representation will be on view through March 28, 2027, at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, P.O. Box 362377, San Juan, Puerto Rico.