In recent years, thousands of Puerto Ricans have left the island because of the crippling debt crisis. Many neighborhoods in Puerto Rico reflect this financial hardship: Streets are empty, storefronts are vacant, buildings are crumbling, the infrastructure is ancient.
Where many see squalor, the muralists of Puerto Rico see opportunity. Street art is booming in the U.S. territory. Photographer Pablo Delano is there to document it before artworks are painted over by other muralists, vandalized or destroyed.
Dozens of street-art photographs by Delano — a Trinity College professor of fine arts and native of Puerto Rico who lives in West Hartford — are assembled in an exhibit at Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury.
“There are murals and wall art in virtually every single town on the whole island, thousands and thousands and thousands of murals,” said Delano. “There is great creative energy, especially in the district of San Juan called Santurce. … Art tourism is growing. People from all over the world come to Puerto Rico to see the street art.”
Many cities worldwide in recent years have embraced street art, and San Juan reflects that movement. However, Delano said there are many additional reasons for the growing trend specific to Puerto Rico’s circumstances.
“A lot has to do with the ever-increasing back-and-forth traffic between New York and Puerto Rico. The South Bronx is the cradle of graffiti and there are many Puerto Ricans in the South Bronx. Some of the most renowned historical figures in graffiti are of Puerto Rican descent,” he said. He added that young artists on the island feel disenfranchised. “They feel there is nowhere to show their work. The gallery scene in San Juan is hard for young artists to break into. Museums are also hard to get into.”
Those factors, and the rising number of abandoned buildings, set the mural movement aflame. To the Puerto Rican muralists, a vacant building isn’t an eyesore, it’s a blank canvas and a public exhibition space. The mural movment has become so popular that there is lively competition for wall space. “There are a lot of artists and only so many walls,” he said.
Delano doesn’t just photograph murals up close, he backs up to place each mural in its urban context. Sometimes the urban setting gives a touching interpretation to the mural, and sometimes vice versa, the mural changes the perception of the setting.
On Calle Montserrat in the Santurce neighborhood of San Juan, Javi Cintrón turned a wall canary yellow and then painted a barrio on it. Delano enhances the poignance of the scene by including items he found in front of the mural: a flattened cardboard box, a pillow and a quilt, evidence that someone sleeps on that sidewalk.
A disintegrating building on a corner is transformed by the blue-toned face of a beautiful woman. A Miguel del Cuadro mural of a sweet little girl looking at a growing plant sits atop a tavern. Two bucking horses with paint-by-number patterns energetically welcome patrons to a betting parlor. An ordinary parking lot is beautified by a massive trompe l’oeil boombox.
Some of the Puerto Rican murals are political and run the risk of being destroyed for that reason. In one photo, a man raises his fist in front of a painting of former Gov. Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, the word “decoloniza” (de-colonize) prominent in the foreground.
Another pays homage to art history, with a portrait of Puerto Rican impressionist painter Francisco Oller.
Once murals disappear, Delano’s photographs could be the only evidence that they once existed. “It’s an amazing phenomenon and it needs to be documented,” he said.
‘Between Two Worlds’
Another exhibit at the Mattatuck is called “Between Two Worlds,” and that title could apply to the museum itself. While Delano’s work focuses on bare-bones artists working in a struggling society, Hunt Slonem’s art is all about excess. “To Hunt Slonem, less isn’t more, and more isn’t even more. More is not enough,” said Cynthia Roznoy, the museum’s curator.
There are no political messages or somber subtexts in Slonem’s work, but rather bunnies, birds, butterflies and monkeys, hundreds of them, repeated endlessly in wildly colored patterns: yellow birds against a pink background, pink birds and blue and yellow butterflies against a gold background, red and yellow birds against a blue background, white birds and flowers against a gold background.
Fifty-three paintings of bunnies hang salon-style next to a wall covered with bunny wallpaper designed by Slonem, who is an interior designer as well as an artist. A painted wooden sculpture of monkeys in trees sits beside Slonem’s “monkey eye” paintings. Endless repetitions of monkey eyes form the background of another of his animal motifs, as multicolored butterflies rest on a background of multicolored monkey eyes.
Slonem’s lush interior design aesthetic combines artworks such as these with ornate antique furniture and collections of glass vessels crammed together on tables. Roznoy has taken countless items out of museum storage to recreate a Slonem-style room decor in the second-floor gallery, including statuary, glassware, serving pieces, furniture and a harmonium sitting underneath five multicolored portraits of President Lincoln.
A third exhibit, of boldly colorful acrylic landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes by Woodbury-based painter Christian Césari is in the first-floor Munger Room. And in an alcove in the historical section of the museum is an amusing oddity: a Peter Kirkiles bronze sculpture that recreates, in large scale, the Bernard pliers which were sculptor Alexander Calder’s favorite tool.
PUERTO RICO ARTE URBANO: PABLO DELANO and “Mon Grand Soleil Blue: Christian Césari” will be at Mattatuck Museum, 144 West Main St. in Waterbury, until Dec. 4. “Hunt Slonem: Between Two Worlds” will be up until Jan. 15. mattatuckmuseum.org.
