The Magic of Memory: Reimagining Resilience in Diasporic Puerto Rican Art
Commissioned by ShowUp/Beacon Gallery
Tenderly placed in a corner of Unaccustomed Earth is a warm and welcoming assortment of items recognizable to many Caribbean Latin Americans: a wicker bowl of tropically colored decorative fruits, a hand-carved wooden mortar and pestle, and a sharp yellow package of Café Bustelo. I recognized these tributes to the exhibition from a studio visit with one of the show’s two featured artists, Emily Rose, in East Boston. I was welcomed into her at-home studio with cafecito and the delicious smells of her sister cooking a celebratory meal for a family gathering later that evening. While that corner of Puerto Rican home goods was not labeled as an art object in her studio or in the gallery, its function as a conduit for feelings of home grounded me in the magic of memory that swirled around Unaccustomed Earth.
Emily Rose, Untitled Installation, Unaccustomed Earth. 2023. Basket, wooden fruit, mortar and pestle, Café Bustelo, cloth and mal de ojo bracelet. Variable dimensions.
In the exhibition, Emily Rose and Beatriz Whitehill– both emerging diasporic Puerto Rican artists– use painting, sculpture, and malleable ideas of collage to tell stories of migration’s impact on the construction of identity and the responsibility of ancestral inheritance across time and place. Yet, despite being deeply personal portraits of memories, stories, and places that each artist grew up hearing about or seeing through their families, the artworks in Unaccustomed Earth collectively present a dream-like sense of love, loss, and longing shared by many immigrant families. In the wake of being untethered, paintings of family, friends, and self, together with lush landscapes and reimagined objects of domestic intimacy, show how Rose and Whitehill fuse memory and mythology as an act of resilience and self-discovery.
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