#museodelasamericas

[pattern-of-flattery]

Puerto Rico: Part One

One thing that 2019 taught me was that you need to stop apologizing for everything and knocking yourself down for not doing “more.” I think North Americans have a problem with constantly trying to outbeat each other. If one person wakes up at 7 am, the other proudly proclaims that they have been awake since 5 am. To anyone feeling like they are not doing “enough,” you are doing great! There is…

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[tinatamale]

#museodelasamericas occupies the entire second floor of the #BallajáBarracks. The museum has eight salas or exhibition rooms, five were open when we visited. Pro-tip: look for the English translation of the area you are looking at in a corner to read first since most of the exhibits are in Espanol. Give yourself at least a couple hours to look around, there were lots of new to me objects & information that I found fascinating. #puertorico #oldsanjuan #viejosanjuan #ttprnyc19 #heritagetravel #heritage #latepost #soymestiza #adventuresoftinatamale (at Museo De Las Américas) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv11_WeB5Im/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1ah4y9txzebum

[carriehaha]

Museo de las Americas has been in Denver for 27 years. It is one of only 14 Latino museums in the United States.

[larespuestamedia]

Museo de las Américas • Old San Juan Photo Credit: @elviador #everyday_puertorico #larespuestamedia #puertorico #vivapuertoricolibre #island #boricuapride #boricuascape #diaspora #boricuadiaspora #museodelasamericas

[drownmeinbeauty]

THE PEN IS MIGHTIER

There’s an exhibit, Imalabra, at the Museo de las Americas in San Juan devoted to artist Antonio Martorell and his “amigos.”  It’s really a tribute to the stamina and imagination of Martorell himself, whose ouevre spans five decades and a dazzling, almost comical, array of media: installation, sculpture, painting, drawing, illustration, printmaking, film, and set and costume design.  Martorell’s work calls to mind that of his contemporary Lucas Samaras, whose lifelong project also seems less concerned with the expression of formal ideas than the act of producing things. Both men do so with such ferocity and velocity that these things, taken as a whole, furnish a kind of autobiography.

Almost all of Martorell’s works in the show, which is organized around large-scale installations, rely on his brilliance as a draftsman.  His hand is energetic, authoritative, and playful, and his sensibility is dense, so that his drawings (ink on plastic, charcoal on paper, pen on board) have a powerful emotional charge.  Compositionally, figures often collect on one side of the page, as if they are about to burst out of it.   Characters are rendered taut with kinetic energy, in tension with one other and their settings.

Martell integrates words with images particularly skillfully.  Text, rendered in a large langorous script, is often laid over figures, which are often drawn across pages torn from a book, adding pictorial depth.  In other works drawings are rendered on lengths of fabric and draped across frames and furniture, complicating their legibility.  The show includes life-size silhouettes of hip street characters stamped on canvas, framed portraits of political figures crafted with shards from aluminum cans, vinyl floor coverings printed with newspaper collages, and, towards the end, a series of simple (and stunning) charcoal drawings of a bookshelf.  All of these pieces can be understood as drawings, as surfaces inscribed with story.  If the show asks, broadly, How far can drawing take you?, the answer is, Very far indeed.

[donmarcos]

#losrenegados #ricardoalegria #museodelasamericas #sanjuan