San Juan: Collectors, Collections and the Art Market
Thalia Vrachopoulos
Allora Calzadilla, Traffic Patterns, 2001-2003
As any cursory look will evince, the art scene of San Juan is vital and hopping. This is a change from five years ago when most of the galleries exhibited modernist painting or local folk arts, and the closest museum of contemporary art was in Ponce, a city in the deep south. Recent developments owe their genesis to several factors such as the opening of the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico, in 2000. Additionally, the support of a coalition of important collectors, as well as attempts by private curators have helped regenerate and
update their city’s cultural environment. Michelle Marxuach made considerable contributions toward this goal during her five-year term as director of M & M Proyectos. Marxuach founded this non-profit space not only as a way of revitalizing the art scene by providing global exchange via exhibitions, residencies, and symposia, but also to showcase avant-garde global and local projects. Recently, when its director took a much-needed sabbatical, the space closed. But during her term, Marxuach?s unstinting energies were successful, resulting in a number of international curatorial projects that brought San Juan what was possibly its first serious rapprochement with the global community. She innovated projects involving interventions with public spaces and invited artists from around the world to create works and as residents to M& M Proyectos. This endeavor would probably not have been possible without the aid of the art patrons Diana and Moises Berezdivin who donated and prepared a multi-storied space that had previously belonged to their retail stores, in which to house the project. This enlightened couple has done much to revitalize the contemporary art climate of their city both through their patronage and
their own collection, which boasts such artists as Guillermo Kuitka, Louise Lawler, Ana Mendieta, Gabriel Orozco, Takashi Murakami, Andres Serrano, and Viktor Muniz among many others.
The Berezdivins escaped Castro’s Cuba for Miami in 1960, and soon went to New York where they lived for more than a year until they finally settled in San Juan in 1963 where they built and operated their chain of retail stores. Diana was first to become interested in and collect art, later she found ways to engage Moises while on their travels around the world. During those early years while in Tel-Aviv whose art community was older than Puerto Rico’s, they met two dealers whose advice to maintain a sharp focus in their collecting practices
they?ve heeded. The Perezdivin Collection was begun with modernist works of Cuban and Israeli diaspora artists and then was expanded with Latin American and Puerto Rican art. In the last five years they’ve been focusing on global installation art, which is for the most part bulky and space consuming, so they’ve outgrown their available space and sought alternatives. Consequently, Espacio 1414 was born, a multistoried building with three floors of exhibition space for international examples of installation art as well as those by artists from Puerto Rico, Cuba and Latin America. Espacio 1414 will showcase installations, which because of their great number will need to be rotated throughout the year. The Berezdivin Collection is being managed by a very capable young curator Julieta Gonzalez who studied in Spain as well as having taken part in the Whitney Program in New York. Her astute curatorial practices are evident in the opening show, as much in its organizational acumen as in its works’ labels, which are composed of folded cards that elegantly sit on small metal wall brackets. Beginning with the entry area, Gonzalez has organized it as a presentation or history of the Berezdivins’ collecting practices and then she branches out to thematically unite numerous works on each of the three floors and hallways. One of the featured works was by a young Puerto Rican couple Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla who have been working with light as a connection between interior and exterior, as well as, public and private spaces. By utilizing fluorescent light as does Dan Flavin, they could be said to be entering a discourse with him, but while Flavin’s focus is on color this couple is engaging with current geographical issues through light. Allora y Calzadilla’s installation at Espacio 1414 consists of a room with transparent tiles on its ceiling through which every few moments the colors yellow, to green and red can be seen to change much like a traffic light. The light appearing in the room is connected to the traffic light of the street and changes according to the timing the city has imposed upon its parameters. By using this public modality Allora y Calzadilla impose governmental rule upon a private sector with the result of disorienting, and frustrating viewer expectation while simultaneously causing him/her to react to its color signal as if following directions like a robot.
The Havana born Juan Francisco Elso?s installation of a hobbyhorse entitled Caballos Contra Colibri, 1988 represents the highpoint of this artist’s career when he began to be recognized. In the 1980s Elso inspired his generation of artists to seek alternatives that would lead them away from Castro’s rigid nationalism. While undergoing tremendous hardships and defying censorship, Elso challenged misconceptions of Latin Americans through popular stereotypes by creating a critical cultural anthropology in his images. Elso’s Caballos
Contra Colibri looks back to the Cuban colonialist period in which the overwhelming tide of foreign influence gave rise to the slave trade and to its emerging stereotypes. Much of his work involves the Afro-Cuban religion Santeria based upon a combination of Yoruba and Catholic beliefs whose symbolism for the horse is analogous to the taking possession of,of a believer by the orisha or spirit which mounts him like a horse. Thus in this case the horse with a large bird above it as if leading the way can also be read as a metaphor for Castro’s possession of the Cuban people.
Alexis Leyva Machado (Kcho) through installation while expressing the unity in nature points to the differences between centrality and
the other, while also acknowledging his debt to Juan Francisco Elso as inspiration. The topic of migration is evident in Kcho’s many works utilizing the recurring leitmotif of the boat shape. Whether formed out of clay totemic sculptures, bottles or as in this particular work, red chairs, the boat motif is abides. He develops his topic of exile with a series of drawings as part of the installation while imbuing his works with additional meaning with such titles as solocomprendo lo que pienso cuando lo dibujo (I only understand what I think
when I draw,)1999.
Kcho’s installation like Duchamp’s Readymade Bicycle Wheel, 1913 whose wheel was rendered moot by being turned upside down and placed on a stationary stool, controverts the notion of the object’s usefulness and in this case results in the idea of ‘boatness’
rather than in its physical similitude. Although in existence since the 1960s, the Berezdivin Collection, because of its private nature, could only affect limited influence on the local art scene, but with its introduction to the public sphere at Espacio 1414, it promises to become a crucial step in San Juan’s engagement with alternative venues, as well as, presaging a serious commitment to the contemporary global art community. /p>
Puerto Rico’s citizenry in general is attending increasingly more openings at art galleries that are gaining momentum in their efforts to globalize their venues. Galeria Comercial whose title puns the commercialism of the art market, is a new gallery founded by Francisco Rovira a very young dealer/entrepreneur. In his second exhibition Rovira featured the work of Chicago based artist Scott Roberts, who engages with technology and popular culture in works such as Lucky a video projection on three sides of a box of the same dimensions as a Lucky Charms cereal box. According to Pedro Velez, a local art critic who reviewed the show, Roberts’ Lucky is a sickening look at desire and the ever-changing values promoted by popular culture. One of the older more established gallery spaces the Botello Gallery is still going strong while constantly renewing its own image in light of international art fairs, exhibitions and bienials. Acknowledging the role of private collectors like the Berezdivins, and the engineer Jose Andreu who are founding members of the
Museum of Puerto Rico, Juan Botello also cited the museum as an important impetus behind the growth of the San Juan art market. Its recent exhibitions are critically viable including projects such as the forthcoming show. "None of the Above: Contemporary Puertorrican Art" organized around the questioning of traditional curatorial practices while revising these methodologies by including the choices of young collectors. Galeria Botello was founded by Juan Botello’s artist father with a modernist focus but has recently expanded its
breadth through the incorporation of contemporary installation artists Rafael Trelles, Doris Rios, and Nestor Otero. Trelles engages with the environment creating stenciled images on sidewalks, walls and stairs using designs reminiscent of Moorish tiles and at times incorporates figures. His stencils are applied to exterior walls and then the image is cleaned via sandblasting which results in the most delicate, nuanced shaded designs and figures. On the opposite spectrum of his shaded stencil works are colorful ones such as Visitas
al Velorio recently purchased by the Museum of Puerto Rico. It is a lively environment in which figures dressed in historical costumes collide with contemporary technology, and industrial elements with those of farming, resulting in a collage of riotous color. Doris Rios is another local installation artist represented by the Galeria Botello. Rios’s Acerca de vainas y guijarros, 2004, is a mixed media work comprising three shallow bowls stacked with white broken stones and a low platform loaded with similar stones on top of which rest black missiles that have been divided in half. While the work’s pristine surface belies its military references, its coloration speaks of purity juxtaposed against the sublime beauty of machine-made black surfaces such as would be seen on warheads. The materials’ preciousness is evident on the shiny black burnished surfaces as well as on the white whose precarious nature could only be imagined. While these strategic weapons could be read in view of recent events, they can also be seen in light of Puerto Rico’s annexation by the United States on July 24th, 1889.
Another gallery in transition within the Hato Rey area is La Pintadera. Although known primarily for its focus on modernist painting and sculpture, lately its owners Robert Hernandez and Adelberto Melendez are including contemporary art by such painters as Edra Soto and Cachelia Soto Gonzalez. The former creates monumental paintings of cultural icons culled from both local and international news media
executing them in color outline. Accessing the Mexican mural tradition both in her use of many figures and in her white backgrounds reminiscent of white stucco, Soto’s images result in cultural palimpsests. Soto-Gonzalez’s paintings may initially take their inspiration from digital photography in their aural bands of coloration or Warhol’s portraits in their sitter’s familiarity, but they are post-modern appropriations in their examination of the commodified sexual imagery typically appearing in popular magazines. Her figures, while
beautiful, because of their poseur’s stance, simultaneously expose the vulnerability of public idols so easily torn down. San Juan may not boast of a large art market but it is rich in talent, and promises to break out of its local boundaries to become universally viable in the ensuing years.
