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)
Karlo Andrei Ibarra
Karlo Andrei Ibarra employs a wide variety of media, often with an eye to hijacking contemporary art forms to address Puerto Rico’s subordinate position as an unincorporated territory of the United States. Niebla (Fog), for instance, is composed of 60 modest-sized canvases tiled together to create a large-scale monochrome work. Ibarra painted each canvas separately allowing for surface variations—from pale grays to light pinks to soft browns—but Ibarra's "paint" is made from toxic coal ash collected from the AES power plant incinerator in the town of Peñuelas. Exposure to coal ash has been linked to bladder, stomach, skin, lung and kidney cancers, as well as asthma, emphysema and infertility. Through his minimalist installation, Ibarra joins a growing movement calling attention to the dangers posed by the operations of this global, U.S.-based energy giant.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Karlo Andrei Ibarra (Puerto Rico, 1982)
Lives and works in San Juan.
Karlo Andrei Ibarra is an artist and cultural manager. His work has been shown widely including in Cuba, El Salvador, Panama, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Poland, Norway, Taiwan, China, and the U.S. He has participated in the Biennial of Bucharest (Romania); the San Juan Poly-Graphic Triennial of San Juan, Latin America, and the Caribbean (PR); and in the Moscow International Biennial of Young Art. His work is represented in the collections of the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo de San José (San José, Costa Rica); the Museo y Centro de Estudios Humanísticos Dra. Josefina Camacho de la Nuez, Universidad del Turabo, (Gurabo, PR); the Cisneros Fontanals Collection (Miami, FL); and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Buenos Aires, Argentina). He is the co-founder of the contemporary art space KM 0.2 in Santurce, PR.
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.
