4th SAN JUAN POLY/GRAPHIC TRIENNIAL:

4th
SAN JUAN POLY/GRAPHIC TRIENNIAL:
Latin America and the Caribbean
Displaced Images / Images in Space
October 24, 2015–February 27, 2016

Waltercio Caldas, Como imprimir Sombras, (How to Print Shadows), 2012 .

The 4th San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial: Latin America and the Caribbean is an international cultural event sponsored by the government of Puerto Rico and organized by the Fine Arts Program of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture (ICP). Created in 2004, the Triennial promotes experimentation in the graphic arts, stimulating the combination of traditional printmaking and contemporary practices within a different curatorial theme each year. This edition’s curatorial team is comprised of chief curator Gerardo Mosquera (Cuba) and co-curators Vanessa Hernández Gracia (Puerto Rico) and Alexia Tala (Chile).
It has been said that the age of Gutenberg, the age of the text, is past, and that today we live in the age of the image. But a qualifier might be in order: We live in the age of the displaced image. The current ubiquity of images has led to their transformation in almost endless ways. Images are in constant transmutation as they shift among techniques, media, contexts, and cultures. They are appropriated and re-signified—recycled for new uses. They travel, they spread vertiginously around the world, in a visual tsunami that sweeps us up in its torrents.
The 4th Triennial will examine the formal, methodological and conceptual shifts and hybridizations of the graphic image across different fields, media, backgrounds, habits, and senses, as well as its projection into three-dimensional space. The works chosen for exhibition will manifest the expanded, instrumental, and decentralized nature of contemporary graphic arts—a decentralization that might lead us to speak of a post-graphic art. While the aim of the Triennial is to present the “poly”-faceted explosion in the graphic arts today, it will also include examples of traditional printmaking articulated in an expanded field. It will feature artists from Puerto Rico, Latin America, and the Caribbean, as well as Latino artists residing in the United States, including solo shows by Myrna Baéz, Fernando Bryce, and Carlos Garaicoa and important interventions in the public space.
This ambitious edition of the Triennial will include exhibitions, educational activities, events, and publications throughout Puerto Rico, expanding beyond the capital city of San Juan to include spaces on the periphery and in other municipalities.

Curatorial Team

Gerardo Mosquera
Gerardo Mosquera is an independent art critic, curator, art historian, and writer based in Havana and Madrid. He is chief curator for the 4th San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial and advisor to the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, the MUAC in Mexico City, Art in General in New York City, and other international art centers. He is co-founder of the Havana Biennial and a former curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Artistic director for PHotoSpain 2011, 2012 and 2013 in Madrid, Mosquera recently curated the exhibitions “Lost in Landscape” for MART in Italy and “Artificial Amsterdam” for de Appel, Amsterdam.

Mosquera is the author of numerous books and essays on contemporary art and art theory, and a volume of his theoretical essays has just appeared in Chinese in Beijing. He is a member of the advisory board of several art journals, including Art Nexus (Bogota), Calabar, and Nka (New York). Mosquera has lectured extensively in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. He received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990.

Alexia Tala
Alexia Tala is an independent curator currently working as co-curator for the 4th San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial, curator of the Printmaking Collectors Club of the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, and artistic director of Plataforma Atacama, a project addressing the relationship between art and place based in the Atacama desert in Chile. Formerly curator of Focus Brasil (Chile, 2010) and chief curator of LARA (Latin American Roaming Art 2012- 2013), Tala has also curated solo exhibitions by artists such as Cadu, Francisca Aninat, Marcelo Moscheta, and Hamish Fulton, and was co-curator for the first Performance Biennial Deformes (Chile, 2006), the exhibition “Museum Man: Historia de la Desaparición” (Franklin Furnace Archives–Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda, Chile, 2007), the 8th Mercosur Biennial: Essays in Geopoetics (Brazil, 2011), “Solo Projects: Focus Latin America” for ARCO 2013, and solo projects for Summa Art Fair Madrid . She writes for art publications in Latin America and the United Kingdom, and is the author of Installations and Experimental Printmaking (UK, 2009).

Vanessa Hernández Gracia
Vanessa Hernández Gracia is an independent curator, artist, and educator. She earned a BFA magna cum laude in Sculpture at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico (1999), an Advanced Studies diploma in Drawing at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (2004), and an MFA in Artistic Production at the Universidad Politécnica in Valencia, Spain (2012). Between 2000 and 2002 she worked as an assistant coordinator with curator Michy Marxuach for M&M contemporary art projects, PR’00 [Paréntesis en la “ciudad”] and PR’02 [En ruta]. Formerly guest curator of exhibits at Galería 356, =DESTO, Área: Lugar de Proyectos, and the independent platform La Nómada, she also curated the exhibition “Intervenciones / Convergencias: Una mirada crítica a la producción temprana de Félix González-Torres” at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (2010). As an artist, she has presented installations, videos, photography, and performances in Puerto Rico, Spain, the Dominican Republic, France, New York, and Miami. In 2013, she took part in the Residence Internationale, Formation Réseau Européen, at the Institut Supérieur des Beaux Arts in Besançon, France. She currently teaches at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico and the University of Puerto Rico–Río Piedras.

Educational Project Concept :

Raquel Torres Arzola
Raquel Torres Arzola is an artist, art critic, and educator. She earned her MFA at the San Francisco Arts Institute and her BA in History and MFA in Design at the University of Puerto Rico. Her art has been exhibited in institutional and alternative spaces in Puerto Rico, the United States, and Spain and she has published in academic spaces in Puerto Rico and internationally. She currently teaches in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras. She is in charge of developing and implementing the first phase of the Educational Plan for the 4th Poly/Graphic Triennial.

Windy M.Cosme Rosario
Windy M. Cosme Rosario is a museologist, cultural agent, and educator. She has an MA in Cultural Administration and Agency from the University of Puerto Rico–Río Piedras Campus and a masters degree in Museology from the University of Granada in Spain. Her undergraduate degree is in Pre-Law and American History from the University of Puerto Rico. One of her more significant experiences was studying abroad as an exchange student at the University of Salamanca in Spain. In 2012, Cosme worked as the educational coordinator for the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico. In 2013, she was part of the team behind the exhibition “Paradox Fabric: Art Research in Context (P-Fabric)” in Granada, Spain. Recently she was the coordinator of “Proyecto Santurce: 30 años del MAC en el barrio” and an educator in the program “Enlace: Escuela / Museo del MAC.” At the present time, she teaches in the Humanities Department at National University College and is in charge of developing and implementing the second phase of the Educational Plan for the 4th San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial.
Digital Exhibition Curator

Diana Cuéllar
Diana Cuéllar Ledesma is a PhD student at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where she earned a masters degree in the History of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, awarded jointly by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Her area of research is the representation of race, sexuality, and gender in the visual culture of Latin America. She is a regular contributor to ArtNexus and the journal Third Text.

Participating artists