At the Whitney, Puerto Rican Artists Reflect on the Tragedy and Transformation of Hurricane Maria

The first major survey of contemporary Puerto Rican art in nearly half a century, “no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria” at the Whitney is a seminal event in the history of the self-proclaimed museum of American art. Coinciding with the fifth anniversary of the category-four storm that hit Puerto Rico in 2017, the show brings together 20 artists who actively interrogate the tragedy and transformation realized by Hurricane Maria. Altogether, the works foreground how the issues of land sustainability and social rupture that preceded the storm were brought to sharp relief by its catastrophic impact. The permanence of these continuing realities lends a sense of meaning and urgency to the exhibition.

The title, which translates to “A post-hurricane world doesn’t exist,” is borrowed from Puerto Rican poet Raquel Salas Rivera and frames the show’s central questions on the derailing effects of catastrophe: How can artists position themselves in relation to such a cataclysmic event? What does it mean to move forward from disaster? And how can such a journey be represented? This is a presentation in which the island’s ecological and social climates are deliberately conflated.

Diagonally suspended from the ceiling, a wooden lamppost salvaged from the storm debris opens the exhibition. It bears a sign decorated with the symbol of the American flag, encouraging people to vote in favor of statehood for the contentious, nonbinding referendum held three months before Hurricane Maria made landfall. The work, Gabriella Torres-Ferrer’s Untitled (Valora tu mentira americana) (Untitled [Value Your American Lie]) (2018), shadows the storm’s collapse of the island’s already vulnerable and outdated electricity grid. The disaster resulted in the longest blackout in U.S. history, lasting 11 months, and destroyed much of Puerto Rico’s distribution infrastructure.

With an upended pole serving as a metaphor for the island’s structural dependency and obsolescence exposed by the storm, the message is simple but the biting irony is powerful and multilayered. We are reminded of how the island’s relationship with the U.S. is still deeply contested and continues to polarize Puerto Rico.

A central theme explored in the exhibition is foreign ideation and consumption of the island, as seen in Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s video collage B-Roll (2017). Here, field recordings from the 2016 Puerto Rico Investment Summit play over promotional videos featuring familiar tropes of idyllic Caribbean beaches and first-rate resorts, parodying a capital paradise for foreigners. The underlying effect of tourism and foreign investment come into focus in Yiyo Tirado Rivera’s La Concha (2022), a sandcastle sculpture modeled after the iconic eponymous hotel in San Juan. The work’s gradual deterioration throughout the run of the exhibition alludes to both the risk of building Puerto Rico’s economy around foreign consumption and the island’s ongoing coastline erosion due to the global climate crisis.

Vast themes like fractured infrastructure, mass exodus, and the destruction of the Caribbean ecology are also handled in the context of individual histories. In Armig Santos’s haunting canvases, a group of men carry a wooden cross along a beach, referencing the religious procession held in honor of David Sanes in 1999 after he was killed in a civilian casualty by two U.S. military practice bombs. The paintings endeavor to capture a collective renewal—a certain regeneration or miraculous restoration of life—while fixed in sharp intimations of mortality and brutality.

Meanwhile, Gabriella Báez’s “Ojalá nos encontremos en el mar (Hopefully, We’ll Meet at Sea)” (2018–present) memorializes the artist’s late father, who died by suicide a few months after Hurricane Maria. A myriad of ephemera, from an old t-shirt to a family photo album, are transformed into intimate gestures of remembrance. Hands and eyes in family photographs are stitched together by suspended strands of red thread, a meditation on generational bonds that animates the photographic material with immense personal affect. It is a kind of art that works close to life, texturing the show’s broad and complex ruminations on rupture with an intimate distillation of loss.

The exhibition culminates with Miguel Luciano’s Shields/Escudos (2020), protest shields made of sheet metal reclaimed from decommissioned school buses—a result of the hundreds of public schools in Puerto Rico closed by the Department of Education for financial reasons. The work is painted with black and white flags of Puerto Rico, a powerful sign broadly used by inhabitants of the U.S. territory for anti-colonial mourning and resistance.