Puerto Rican art – Art Spiel

October 22, 2025October 28, 2025, by Jessica Aguilar

Art Spiel Picks: Philadelphia Exhibitions in October 2025

HIGHLIGHTS

Clay as Care Installation view. Photo by The Clay Studio

Just as a solitary action can cause a ripple effect, the sharing of unique ideas can inspire and transform existing systems to include and support different communities. The exhibitions this month demonstrate genuine curiosity and meaningful activation, leading to a trend of revisionist histories in art, institutional displays, or familial archives. Curators Jennifer Zwilling and Nicole Pollard reinvent how gallery exhibitions should be interacted with and ask the question of how clay can assist in caring for mental health at The Clay Studio. Artists Mahsa Attaran, Monica Hamilton, Hanieh Kashani, and Anna Schwartz create a language to describe the power of memory as they mine through personal photographs and materials at Automat Collective. Calero Rodríguez establishes her own History of Art, incorporating Latino, Afro, and Carribean imagery in masterly assembled collages at Taller Puertoriqueño.

August 14, 2023August 7, 2023, by Art Spiel

Jonathan Torres: Painting Anxiety and Beauty

In Dialogue

Sube y Baja 2021 Mixed media 47” x 39.25”

Jonathan Torres is a Puerto Rican artist born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He is based in Brooklyn, NY since 2010 and was recently a resident at the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in DUMBO. In his paintings and sculptures a sense of otherworldliness and living in the diaspora recur. For over 15 years, Torres’ practice has grown from exploring different emotional and mental stages that have affected the way people interact with each other throughout various stages of life—crisis and anxiety with a bent of dark humor that have been crucial to the development of Torres’ imagery.

February 22, 2023February 22, 2023, by Art Spiel

A Grain of Salt | Un Grano de Sal at ELM

Featured Artist

*Styrofoam Cristalizador de Sal | Styrofoam Salt Crystalizer*, 2023. © Fernando Ruíz Lorenzo / Artist Rights Society, 2023

A Grain of Salt | Un Grano de Sal, the new exhibition at the Boiler in ELM Foundation features Fernando Ruíz Lorenzo’s new body of work—a series of paintings and installations with solar salt, styrofoam, acrylic, and aerosol paint. Ruíz Lorenzo’s work merges the history and political narratives of Puerto Rico’s colonial relationships to Spain and the United States.

December 7, 2022May 12, 2024, by Saul Ostrow

Another Fumble at the Whitney: no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria

Opinion

A group of people in a room with posters on the wall

Description automatically generated with medium confidence — Installation view. Photo courtesy of the writer.

The exhibition no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria, though it includes 50 works by 20 artists, seems overwhelmed given it has been installed in an enormous space. With the exception of two lounge-like areas in which billboard-sized video projections are installed, most of the works, modest in scale, seem to be scattered through the space, or enigmatically clustered together. Ironically, where the Wake of Maria is sparsely installed and attended, the Edward Hopper NY exhibition, given its scale and popularity, would definitely benefit from more space than the half floor it has been jammed into. Another oddity is the disparity in the number and scale of works each artist is represented by. I can only suspect the budget of this show was insufficient to achieve its stated ambition of “presenting artworks made over the last five years by an inter-generational group of artists from Puerto Rico and its diaspora.”

June 8, 2020July 10, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

David Rios Ferreira – Catalytic Lines

(detail) *Don’t you see I got everythin’ you need*, 2019. Photo: Jason Wyche

David Rios Ferreira‘s energetic drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations flirt with cacophony yet manage to stay on the verge, creating an idiosyncratic sense of order out of chaotic turmoils. Through turbulent lines and vibrant colors, his imagery projects a rigorous visual universe where Geo-political and mythical narratives fuse organically. David Rios Ferreira shares with Art Spiel the main ideas behind his work, elaborates on some specific projects, and sheds some light on his prolific curatorial practice. Although our interview process started a few months before the Corona pandemic and the recent global protests related to the Black Lives Matter movement, David Rios Ferreira added his response to the current events, implemented at the beginning of this interview.

October 7, 2019November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Elizabeth Velazquez: All Realities

Elizabeth Velazquez, Cigar Factory Final Exhibition, 2019, installation view- 2 of 4 rooms, photo courtesy Sakeenah Saleem

Elizabeth Velazquez makes powerful installations in response to the history and geography of a site. While her work often unleashes dark secrets from a hidden past with particular sensibility to social injustice, it also elevates our gaze upwards, conjuring an essence of spirituality out of the materials she is using. The artist shares with Art Spiel the ideas and process behind her recent body of work.