‘Nostalgia for My Island’ Offers a Compressed and Communal History of Puerto Rican Art and Identity

At the opening reception for Rollins Museum of Art’s Winter exhibit, the then-curator and now-interim director, Dr. Gisella Carbonell, described her first encounter with fine art. As a child, she traveled from San Juan to the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico with her grandparents and recalled a revelatory, joyful feeling during that visit—it was a pivotal moment that helped engender her later dedication to art and career in museums.

Now at Rollins Museum of Art, “Nostalgia for My Island,” a traveling exhibit of twenty artworks from the same museum she visited as a child, personally resonates for Carbonell. For her—like other members of the Puerto Rican diaspora in Central Florida—the show is an embracive recognition of Puerto Rican heritage. In it are artworks by Puerto Rican artists, completed between the 18th and 20th Centuries, offering a pictorial self-history of the island’s unified, yet concurrently shifting and intercultural, identity that serves as a chronology of change, from Puerto Rico’s early colonial years under the Spanish to its contemporary position as an “unincorporated” territory of the United States following its invasion in 1898. Front and center is the Puerto Rican struggle to maintain a national identity despite the imposition of colonial powers—whether Spanish or American.

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The exhibit’s earliest piece, The Vision of Saint Philip Benizi, reminds the viewer of the colonial transmission of religiosity. The artwork, by prominent 18th-century painter José Campeche Y Jordán, depicts a classical scene of divine vision-ecstasy: Saint Benizi enveloped by clouds, his gaze directed up towards figures from religious iconography—Mary, Jesus, God-as-Father and innocent baby-angels—who languor in a heavenly second tier of the composition above his head. Considered Puerto Rico’s first master artist, Campeche created works indicative not only of a Christian religiosity inherited from the Spanish but also the continuity with European artistic approaches, such as the baroque style that his work intimates in its use of ornate exuberance.

A similar cultural synthesis is found in a mid-20th-century artwork by José R. Oliver titled, Ño Gervasio’s Family. The painting candidly captures sixteen loosely-drawn family members inside a single-room home in Puerto Rico—yet, formally, the scene uses a distinctly cubist approach, with sharp-edged but subtly colored geometric triangles streaming in with the light from the sole window, diffused throughout the humble wooden structure and falling onto the folds of the family members’ clothing.

Oliver’s piece is emblematic of this collection’s recurring convergence of specificity with international formal influence: it is a visual representation of a particular Puerto Rican family refracted through a European style. Another piece that mimics this motif of universalized international influence with Puerto Rican particularity is a seemingly standard, too-easily overlooked still-life by the famed artist Fransisco Oller Y Cestero. Its subdued, detailed realism—along with the arrangement of fruits, tablecloth, knife and glass bottle on a table—recall the conventional European approach to the still-life, but the content of the picture defies universalization: the painting consists of tropical citrus fruits commonly grown on the island and sweet potatoes, both non-native to Europe.

For members of the Puerto Rican diaspora of Orlando, who contend with a related process of assimilation without abandoning national-cultural distinctiveness in their transition to America, these pieces mirror their relationship to identity and the confluence of cultures they embody. In a telephone-booth-sized room with a microphone and headphones, there are playable autonarratives of Puerto Ricans detailing their transitions to Central Florida in the mid-20th Century from a repository collected by the Orange County Regional History Center. Visitors can share their own auditory reflections on the island or their experience of the exhibit.

One poem, recorded by a visitor reflecting on her heritage and the show, ends with the lines, “I want to be buried on my island/ If I am reborn/ I want to be Puerto Rican over and over again.”

The people of Puerto Rico are tethered to its physical place—the island’s materiality and beauty are the unifying points for Puerto Ricans, whether or not they remain on the island. In many of the paintings here, as in this visitor’s poem, the island itself is the central subject. Some painters, such as Fernando Díaz Mackenna, purposively eschewed European influence, especially avant-gardism, in favor of the landscapes that pictorially represented national identity. Landscape with Bohío, a painting from 1921 by Mackenna, shows a precarious, rural wooden home in a dense, unadulterated tropical landscape. Another work, more informed by the European landscape tradition, Landscape, View of San Germán, by Waldemar Morales, presents a town embedded in a rolling expanse of fields, hills and mountains leading to the final horizontal register of the blue sky with wisps of white clouds.

Though some artists chose idyllic scenes, depicting a natural concord between land and people, others turned their attention to Puerto Rico’s socio-economic conditions and the mass shift in the 20th Century from rural agrarianism to urban life. One of the youngest paintings in the show, Barrio Tokio, from 1962, puts this turn to poverty-stricken urbanity on display. The muted grey-brown composition, foregrounded by a humble home with a battered fence, signifies the economic conditions for thousands of Puerto Ricans in the 20th Century. After experiencing a succession of natural disasters (earthquakes and hurricanes) over the past decade, this commentary extends to the current conditions of Puerto Rico, with power outages and failing infrastructure.

“Nostalgia for My Island” is not limited to a purely academic retrospective of the island’s history; it also reflects Puerto Rico and its people today, contextualized by history—and represents the void of home to anyone nostalgic for a place other than where they are.

“Nostalgia for My Island” is on view at Rollins Museum of Art through January 5.