What happens when our understanding of Puerto Ricanness is no longer organized around territory? Diasporican Abstraction: Identities Beyond Representation, the new exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MACPR), invites us to do just that: consider diasporic experiences that converge and intertwine with Puerto Rico beyond its territory.
Curated by Abdiel D. Segarra Ríos, the exhibition is the conclusion of a decade of research that brings together more than sixty artists from different generations and geographic backgrounds. Their trajectories extend from Puerto Rico to the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia, intersecting with those of artists from the Caribbean, Central America, and South America.
The curatorial approach establishes dialogues between works spanning generations that share concerns with color, form, materials as well as territory, ancestrality, corporeality, and the natural and built environment. Rather than constructing a chronology of Puerto Rican abstraction in the diaspora, the exhibition proposes a web of relationships, conceived as ecosystems that unfold across the four galleries it occupies. The exhibition moves beyond the structures and categories through which art history is written and questions the need for strictly Puerto Rican, Caribbean or American narratives about abstraction. It recognizes that experiences of movement and belonging generate their own visual languages, independent of physical presence or allegiance to a country's shared imaginary or visual repertoire.
Perhaps most importantly, the exhibition seeks to bring visibility to artists and aesthetics marginalized in the construction of Puerto Rican art narratives. It fosters a dialogue between works from the collection of El Museo del Barrio in New York, many presented for the first time in Puerto Rico, and pieces from MAC's Permanent Collection, as well as new commissions. This encounter evokes the promise of return embedded in the diasporic experience while suggesting that Puerto Rico is not singular and has no immutable center, but rather depends on who is looking and from where.
The exhibition features works by Olga Albizu, Candida Álvarez, Rafael Ferrer, Ivelisse Jiménez, Zilia Sánchez, Edra Soto, Gisela Colón, Nayda Collazo-Llorens, Tony Bechara, Awilda Sterling Duprey, Lee Quiñones, and Ángel Otero, alongside those of fifty other artists from different generations and backgrounds. Rather than simply redrawing the geographic map of Puerto Rican artistic production, these artists question the cross-border realities of Puerto Ricanness, using abstraction as a tool to dislocate identity from territory and reconstruct it through multiple forms of belonging.
Diasporican Abstraction: Identities Beyond Representation will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico from September 26, 2026, through May 2027.