Posted: December 21, 2018
Opening Reception: January 31, 2019-4:30-7:30pm
Artist Panel in room 6304 at 5:30pm
Additional events:
January 28, 2019 - 10am–5pm, drop-in open studios and weaving workshop in the gallery (7170) – come by the gallery to contribute to a woven piece that will be included in the exhibition!
January 29, 2019 - 2–5pm, reading program and weaving workshop with texts from Luisa Capetillo, in the gallery (7170)

Participating Artists include: Jorge Gonzalez, Juan Alberto Negroni, Zaida Balmaseda, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Monica Rodriguez, Mariola Rosario, Sofia Gallisa and Amara Abdal Figueroa.

About this Exhibition:
Puerto Rican contemporary art and practices are more relevant and necessary than ever. In the context of the post-Hurricane Maria, as one of the many natural and unnatural disasters that have affected the island’s contested history, this exhibition attempts to document some of the emerging practices and happenings that have emerged in Puerto Rico and by extension its diaspora.

There is a timelessness to the island - and a particular resilience and creativity that manifests in notoriously colonized and oppressed communities. The artists represented in this exhibition have created new practices that are rooted in distinct poetic responses to local catastrophes such as Hurricane Maria and elongated oppressions by the US mainland such as the sterilization of Puerto Rican women in the 1930s, the US Navy base occupation of Vieques island, and more recently the crushing austerity measures brought by PROMESA, the US-led antidemocratic Fiscal Control Board imposed on the island to oversee debt restructuring.

The work in this exhibition is expressive and beautiful - a guttural sense of loss transformed. Much like our beloved California Central Coast environment, many Puerto Rican artists are engaging the natural world as an inspiring model for communal healing from trauma, regeneration and connection with the divine. These practices demonstrate artists’ and communities’ preoccupation with contesting the often incomprehensible structure of the natural world

These grounding practices look at ecology and landscape - the flowers and seasons and water - as a way to respond to our own senses of despair.

This exhibition was jointly curated by Mariola Rosario and Emma Saperstein.

This exhibit is generously sponsored by: Barbara Bell, David Booker, Howard and Vicki Carroll, David Prochaska, The Quaglino Family & Rosemary Talley