Since the late 19th century, artists from Puerto Rico and its diaspora have favored rural imagery; in the 21st century, however, visions of home have shifted decisively toward suburban and urban environments. Tract housing, interior surfaces, and vernacular design elements—wrought ironwork, decorative tiling, and distinctive color combinations—now dominate domestic scenes. These features inscribe class and ethnic difference while often displacing the human figure. Instead, artists mobilize geometry, pattern, and surface to construct a sense of place.

This shift must be understood in relation to the historical demands placed on Puerto Rican art to represent the island’s political and racial identity as well as its economic conditions. Following the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy in the mid-20th century, processes of urbanization, migration, and large-scale development reshaped everyday life and spatial experience. More recently, fiscal crisis, constraints on local governance, and environmental disasters have further unsettled narratives of progress. Within this context, the motif of home has emerged as a critical site through which artists address legacies of an incomplete modernity while simultaneously engaging the formal languages of abstraction.

During my time at the Center, I examined how Edra Soto (b. 1971), Josué Pellot (b. 1979), Bobby Cruz (b. 1984), Natalia Sánchez (b. 1992), Ada del Pilar Ortiz (b. 1995), Efrén Candelaria (b. 1980), Melissa Raymond (b. 1980), René Sandín (b. 1980), Rogelio Báez Vega (b. 1974), Nora Maité Nieves (b. 1980), and Sofía Gallisá Muriente (b. 1986) negotiate the burden of representation traditionally placed on Puerto Rican artists. Working across media, these artists draw on histories of abstraction while re-situating them within the domain of the domestic. Grids become tile work; planar surfaces evoke walls, floors, and facades; and processes such as molding, sanding, and layering pigment recall the fabrication of domestic environments. In this way, abstraction is neither autonomous nor purely formal. Rather, it becomes entangled with questions of coloniality, failed modernity, and everyday life. 

Despite their abstraction, these works remain paradoxically referential. The familiarity of their materials and patterns produces a form of indexicality, directing the viewer back to the lived environment of the island and its diaspora. The body, though absent, is implied through vantage point, scale, and the placement of works within architectural or public space. Such strategies produce an embodied mode of spectatorship that may resonate differently depending on the viewer’s familiarity with Puerto Rican contexts. The result is a layered aesthetic that is at once locally grounded and conversant with global histories of abstraction, proposing distinct conditions of legibility and affect. In this sense, these practices also articulate an ethics of viewing. They challenge audiences—those accustomed to consuming Puerto Rico as a picturesque landscape, site of crisis, or post-disaster terrain—to engage instead with the textures of lived space and material experience.

My residency at the Center was instrumental in developing this research, allowing me to think critically about referentiality, politics, representation, and abstraction. Having the time to read widely allowed me to view Puerto Rican art through a comparative lens, thinking through essays like Leigh Raiford’s “Burning All Illusion: Abstraction, Black Life, and the Unmaking of White Supremacy” and Lex Morgan Lancaster’s “Feeling the Grid: Lorna Simpson’s Concrete Abstraction” as well as books like Phillip Brian Harper’s Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture and Steven Nelson and Huey Copeland’s Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World. These readings suggested points of convergence with modern African American art and abstraction, pointing the way toward critical approaches to Puerto Rican art. Other volumes consulted at the National Gallery of Art Library include Alexander Alberro’s Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth-Century Latin American Art, the Smithsonian Design Triennial’s Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, and Dolores Hayden’s The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, volumes that posit the critical role of space and memory in the creation of visual materials that explore a sense of identity. Finally, Michael Ann Holly’s Somewhere Between Art History and Phenomenology: At the Still Point of the Painted World was moving and instructive in its deeply personal engagement with painting and lived experience. Regular visits to the galleries allowed me to compare, clarify, and find echoes of Puerto Rican artists’ approach to the familiar. 

Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras
Leonard A. Lauder Senior Visiting Fellow, March–April 2026

Mercedes Trelles will return to her position as interim chair of the art history program at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras, in fall 2026. She is the principal investigator for “Latine Art and Puerto Rico,” a Mellon Foundation–sponsored lecture series and postdoc initiative that will run from fall 2026 to spring 2028.