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Angel Otero, Dreaming In Blue (To Arnaldo Roche), 2019
Constant Storm: Art from Puerto Rico and the Diaspora
September 24 – December 4, 2021
USF Contemporary Art Museum + Online
HOURS: Monday-Friday 10am – 5pm; Thursday 10am–8pm; Saturday 1-4pm; Closed Sundays and USF Holidays (November 11, 25, 26, 27). Visitors to the museum are expected to wear masks and practice social distancing.
Constant Storm: Art From Puerto Rico and the Diaspora will gather, display, record, and conceptualize artistic responses to Hurricane Maria by artists from Puerto Rico and the diaspora. Through artworks and their narratives and socially engaged initiatives, voices from the island and Puerto Rican communities in New York and Florida will materialize a synoptic view of Puerto Rico’s fragile recovery as part of an evolving, 121-year-old historical crisis.
Participating artists include: Rogelio Báez Vega, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Jorge González Santos, Karlo Andrei Ibarra, Ivelisse Jiménez, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Miguel Luciano, SkittLeZ-Ortiz, Angel Otero, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Gabriel Ramos, Jezabeth Roca González, Gamaliel Rodríguez, Yiyo Tirado Rivera.
Curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné, CAM Curator at Large, and Noel Smith, Former Deputy Director and Curator of Latin American and Caribbean Art: organized by USF Contemporary Art Museum
ONLINE EXHIBITION
Exhibition Home // Curatorial Essay | Ensayo Curatorial // Acknowledgements and Foreword | Agradecimientos y Prólogo // Rogelio Báez Vega (EN) | Rogelio Báez Vega (ES) // Jorge González Santos (EN) | Jorge González Santos (ES) // Karlo Andrei Ibarra (EN) | Karlo Andrei Ibarra (ES) // Ivelisse Jiménez (EN) | Ivelisse Jiménez (ES) // Miguel Luciano (EN) | Miguel Luciano (ES) // Natalia Lassalle-Morillo & Sofía Gallisá Muriente (EN) | Natalia Lassalle-Morillo & Sofía Gallisá Muriente (ES) // Angel Otero (EN) | Angel Otero (ES) // Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz (EN) | Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz (ES) // Gabriel Ramos (EN) | Gabriel Ramos (ES) // Jezabeth Roca González (EN) | Jezabeth Roca González (ES) // Gamaliel Rodríguez (EN) | Gamaliel Rodríguez (ES) // Yiyo Tirado Rivera (EN) | Yiyo Tirado Rivera (ES)
Angel Otero
Memory plays a leading role in the making of Angel Otero’s paintings. Otero's unusual technique relies on oil paint applied to a plexiglass surface, dried, peeled off in "skins," and subsequently draped on fabric. Like Arnaldo Roche (1955-2018), the Puerto Rican neo-expressionist painter to whom Dreaming in Blue (To Arnaldo Roche) pays homage, Otero conducts an intense examination of the self within the shifting racial, cultural, and geographic contexts of Caribbean identity. Otero swirls splashes of Roche's azure palette around a central piece of blue fabric—reminiscent of a bedspread or a curtain—while layering meditations on art history, domesticity, and his own childhood into a single work. September Elegy presents a central tombstone-like swath of black paint atop a multicolored surface. As a presence, it resembles the void Hurricane Maria left on the landscape four years ago.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Angel Otero (Santurce, Puerto Rico, 1981)
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Angel Otero is best known for his process-based paintings, collages, and sculptural works that venerate the inherent qualities of his material of choice, oil paint. Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized at Bronx Museum of the Arts (NYC); Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston, TX); Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno (The Canary Islands, Spain); SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah, GA); and Contemporary Art Museum (Raleigh, NC). Recent group exhibitions featuring his work have been presented at Pérez Art Museum (Miami, FL); Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco, CA); and the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH). Otero is the recipient of the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Visual Arts.
Constant Storm: Art from Puerto Rico and the Diaspora is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, sponsored in part by the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Arts and Culture and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, and supported by the Tampa Bay Rays and the Tampa Bay Rowdies. The symposium Bregando with Disasters: Post Hurricane Maria Realities and Resiliencies is supported by a Humanities Centers Grant from Florida Humanities. The USF Contemporary Art Museum is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.
