Puerto Rican Art after the Storm

The art in the Whitney exhibition is mixed, but the museum’s political advocacy ought to imperil its tax-exempt status.

N o existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria, at the Whitney Museum, remembers the disastrous storm that walloped Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. The exhibition title proclaims, “a post-hurricane world doesn’t exist.” Woke bugaboos such as colonialism, climate change, and capitalism dominate the catalogue, which is an orgy of victimhood in parts but also educational and sometimes persuasive on the issue of massive government failure.

The art was a revelation to me. Some of it’s good, some trivial, but I didn’t know any of the artists, so I learned a great deal. No existe is the first major museum survey of new Puerto Rican art in 50 years — it’s overdue.

It’s far too polemical, alas. It doesn’t just situate what’s supposed to be a rigorous, intellectual museum in a new, fact- and logic-free zone. It doesn’t just flirt with political advocacy. It marries the Whitney, a nonprofit, to a flop Castro-Lite political agenda, a wedding that ought to imperil the museum’s tax-exempt status. This is especially true since the director of the museum promises that “this is just the beginning” in his introduction. When Manhattan limousine liberals advocate revolutions close to home or far away, I naturally stand athwart and pucker-whistle.

Still, like most Americans, I knew little about this troubled, abused, chaotic little island. All of us should know more since, putting aside the slew of Trots involved in the show, many but not all of the grievances that the art and essays consider are real.

“There is no place on earth that is safe from the colossal gusts of the climate crisis and capitalist colonization,” the curator, Marcela Guerrero, tells us. Pertinent to No existe, the director, Adam Weinberg, writes, is a new timeless question: “How do artists work in the face of mass dislocation and migration, racism and xenophobia . . . increased sexism and transphobia, the crisis of colonialism, government ineptitude, and a warming planet that unleashes increasingly frequent and destructive disasters?” How do they manage to get up in the morning, I think, much less get the kids dressed and out the door.

Fusillades of delirium such as these are best ignored, except for the always-timely point on government ineptitude. Sad to say, the art seems to them to be illustration, or a launch pad to Planet Rant, so, to give the poor art some context, I’ll start with the facts for clarity’s and reality’s sake.

Hurricane Maria intensified from a category 1 to category 5 storm in just 24 hours before it hit Puerto Rico. Once it came and went, it was one of the deadliest storms since Caribbean records have been kept but by no means the worst. That seems to be the Great Hurricane of 1780. Records before 1920 weren’t consistent or reliable. Hurricanes hitting Puerto Rico in 1899 and 1928 were probably worse in terms of wind velocity, storm surges, and flooding. Of course, the population was then far smaller and technology both less extensive and less intensive.

Maria hit the Caribbean two weeks after Hurricane Irma, itself a terrible, destabilizing storm that affected Puerto Rico but was largely a Florida event. Maria almost completely destroyed Puerto Rico’s power grid. Almost all cell networks, phone landlines, and internet cables were destroyed. The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority had been in bad shape for years, with well-publicized safety problems and an antiquated infrastructure. Access to clean water was severely compromised. According to the National Resources Defense Council, even before Maria, 70 percent of the island’s public water systems didn’t meet the 1974 Clean Water Act infrastructure standards.

In any event, the storm crippled basic utilities for Puerto Rico’s 3.3 million people. “Colonialism” is a pass-the-buck cliché. Puerto Rico is self-governing, and, but for having no U.S. representatives or senators, it’s treated as a state. Maria was a disaster for which Puerto Rico was unprepared, just as New Orleans was unprepared for Katrina. Monster storms hit Florida — far better governed — as often as Puerto Rico but result in fewer catastrophes. Puerto Rico received $70 billion in federal hurricane-relief aid.

Reading the labels and the catalogue and looking at the art, I learned about other grievances. Since 2016, the island government has operated under a federal anti-insolvency mandate developed by Congress and President Obama after Puerto Rico had accumulated $72 billion in government debt and $55 billion in unfunded pension commitments its leaders said it couldn’t pay.

An independent commission has imposed an austerity regimen like the one Greece faced via the European Union a few years ago, meant to compel Puerto Rico to meet rules on deficits and debt. The plan is also similar to Detroit’s, New York’s, and Orange County’s bankruptcy diet. Cuts to Puerto Rico’s bloated public sector continue to bite culture and education hard and deeply.

I hate to quote Calvin Coolidge, when he demanded full repayment of the loans our allies took to fight World War I, but “they hired the money, didn’t they?” The federal scheme has whittled Puerto Rico’s debt cudgel by 80 percent. Puerto Rico, in effect, was taken into receivership, which is where half a dozen American states, all far richer, need to go.

Since Maria and the debt crisis, Puerto Rico experienced earthquakes in 2019 and 2020. In 2019, Ricardo Rosselló, the governor, resigned after his “RickyLeaks” scandal. Hundreds of leaked pages of group chats revealed juicy homophobic, racist, sexist, and vulgar bits from Rosselló, whose father had also been governor. After protests attracting a million Puerto Ricans, he resigned. Like every adept scoundrel, Rosselló made a quick comeback. He’s now Puerto Rico’s official lobbyist to Congress in Washington.

Then came Covid. Puerto Rico kept its schools closed for more than a year, had a long lockdown for businesses, and mask mandates lasting two years.

Puerto Rico is poorer than the poorest state in America but richer than any country in Latin America. Its unemployment rate is 6.2 percent, and it has a robust pharmaceutical, agricultural, and tourism base. Changes in federal tax law a few years ago eliminated many loopholes enjoyed by businesses in Puerto Rico. This led, according to the No existe catalogue, to an island-wide depression that’s ongoing.

I’ve done this research because I need to know the curatorial burdens that the art bears, especially since the curator has a grudge. The art’s a salmagundi. The Whitney’s driven by political, social, and economic messaging, so the art, or the selection of the art, bears the cross of self-righteous anger. It seems so fake or contrived, and it undermines the art.

Alas for the Whitney, whose leaders treat corporate news outlets as the Gospels, hurricanes haven’t increased in ferocity or frequency. Earth’s climate is changing all the time, over 4 billion years. The Whitney’s colonialist, climate-kook shtick is piety on parade and not much else.

Gabriella Báez’s Hopefully, We’ll Meet at Sea is a photograph of the artist and her father on which she’s sewn red thread connecting their hands and eyes. Her father killed himself a few months after Maria. Báez worked from the photographs she inherited. The thread “speculates on the mental health conditions that are passed down from generation to generation,” the curator tells us. This is one way to see the object. She then blames “the state for its negligence toward a vulnerable sector of the population.” It’s a blame game that’s unattractive, a false value, and disheartening.

Aerosoles, from 2021–22, by Frances Gallardo, is a group of etchings inspired by samples of dust from clouds that travel from the Sahara across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Gallardo treated them as aquatint, or a new form of aquatint. Digital images of the dust were etched on paper with a laser cutter and colored with pencil. They’re striking and inventive. The curator tells us they’re “an ominous portrait of the air the nation breathes.”

Yiyo Tirado Rivera’s Caribe Hilton is a sandcastle resembling a fancy hotel that opened in 1949. It’s made to deteriorate slowly over the exhibition and points to coastline erosion and the perils of an economy that relies on tourism. The Whitney’s curator and the artist resent white Americans who vacation there. It’s trite art, but, insofar as the curator is concerned, what about the jobs these gringo sun-seekers create?

Google Ponce Massacre, by Danielle De Jesus, is a big painting about a 1937 civilian march that ended with a police shooting and 21 deaths, among them two cops. I did indeed Google it. It was awful but, occurring 85 years ago, seems tangential. The artist used two photographs as sources. One is from 1937 and depicts a row of bodies. The other is a photograph of two friends who participated in the Ricky-gate protests that ousted the governor. One friend wears a bandana and “was treated aggressively by the police.”

This is college-term-paper stuff. Collapsed Soul, by Gamaliel Rodríguez, is a painting from 2021. The curator flees the art as soon as she can. The picture, which isn’t bad, references, she says, the explosion of the battleship Maine in 1898, Covid’s arrival on the island via, she claims, a cruise ship, and, miracle of miracles, something that makes sense. She resents the Jones Act, a 1920 law requiring ships delivering goods to Puerto Rico to be American owned, built, and staffed. This law raises the cost of food to Puerto Rico.

There’s lots of lingo in the book — like “flotsam and jetsam of this double colonization,” pointing the finger at America for what Spain did. The 2019 protests that overthrew Rosselló were, we’re told, “spaces of Black, feminist, queer, and trans affirmation.” They’re the key to the island’s future.

What could go wrong?

Marina Reyes Franco’s essay on arts and finances in Puerto Rico was great. It’s rare to read an essay about money in an exhibition catalogue. She explains Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy without a grudge. Her piece is in the middle of the book and should have gone to the front. Ramón Rivera-Servera and Guerrero, the curator, write about Puerto Rico as a necropolis. This is a fable. It’s emerging from a bad spot. I felt that the art in the exhibition doesn’t express its cultural riches.

Two-page essays on prison abolition, “pessimistic futurists,” replacement of fossil fuels with Chinese-made, mined-mineral-rich solar panels, and “a politics of love” are deified doodles. No existe isn’t a bad exhibition. It’s a missed opportunity. The Whitney’s appeasing a surly, blinkered, Manhattan-based, left-wing staff that lives on a diet of PC piffle.