At MoMA PS1, Daniel Lind-Ramos’s Sculptures Tell a New Story of Puerto Rican Resistance

In 2019, Daniel Lind-Ramos was a breakout star of the Whitney Biennial. A major artist in his home of Puerto Rico, he had been unjustly neglected in the U.S. at the age of 66. His commanding sculpture Maria-Maria (2019) in that show was a figure with a coconut for a head, sporting a blue mantle, referring to both the Virgin Mary and the tarps that symbolized the shameful federal response to Hurricane Maria in 2017. The piece represented at once protector and destroyer.

While Lind-Ramos continued this breakout New York moment with his 2020 Marlborough Gallery solo, he was unlucky enough to open it just before the city went into COVID lockdown. Since then he’s been celebrated across the nation, winning a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant, the Pérez Prize, and a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant, as his work has entered the collections of museums including the Whitney, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico.

Now “El Viejo Griot: Una Historia de Todos Nosotros” has opened at New York’s MoMA PS1, comprising 10 masterful large assemblage sculptures (four completed during studio time onsite, three from the Marlborough show) and two videos that showcase his unique and powerful sensibility. The sculptures incorporate organic and man-made materials and objects, found or given to him by friends and neighbors. The gifted objects, in particular, carry all the emotional resonance of the lives of those who gave them. The show addresses topics like colonization and resistance, memory, Afrodescendiente Puerto Rican culture, Hurricane Maria, and the pandemic, all the while balancing joy and pain, righteous anger, humor, and grief.

Greeting visitors as they enter is the 17-foot-wide El Viejo Griot (2022–23), which features the bow and oars of a small boat, cruising toward the viewer over a Caribbean Sea made from FEMA tarps. The vessel carries colorful burlap sacks, plastic buckets, a bugle, and conga drums that seem to be played by gloved hands that emerge from behind. The work takes its name from one of the main characters in the annual Fiesta de Santiago Apóstol, a central ritual of the preservation of the Afro-Caribbean culture of Loíza, the artist’s hometown, just east of San Juan, where he still lives. The numerous sacks are emblazoned with significant dates, like 1511 for the Taíno Rebellion against the Spanish; 1797 for the Battle of San Juan, in which Black Puerto Ricans helped fight off British invaders; and 1898, for the U.S. invasion of the archipelago, making the sculpture a literal storyteller, relating tales of colonialist violence and resistance.

This work can appear at once regal and comic, given the surreal addition of the gloved hands playing instruments, like a court musician. In an artist tour of the show, Lind-Ramos noted that this particular contrast could be said to characterize the Puerto Rican people themselves.

Ambulancia (2020) and Alegoría de una obsesión (both 2022–23), meanwhile, respond to the pandemic. In the first work, a bedspring, car bumpers, siren lights, and metal chairs come together in witty fashion to form a stylized version of the titular vehicle. The second includes a gigantic mop that forms an absurd cleaning mechanism in combination with vacuum cleaner bags, buckets, and bleach bottles, all pushed by a figure with another mop for a head, sticks for limbs, and a giant sack for a skirt. Here, comedy and vulnerability touchingly come together.

While not as compelling as the sculptures, the videos Tocones (2019) and Talegas de la memoria (2020) explore the artist’s themes in other ways and attest to his practice in performative media. The latter documents a 2020 performance commissioned by the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, dramatizing events of the history of the region that tie in with colonialism and the slave trade, while, in the former, a woman tells her tale of resistance to gentrification.

Elsewhere, a trio of sculptures refer to Maria, the category-five storm that killed almost 3,000 people. In the nearly 10-foot-tall María Guabancex (2018–22), materials, including siding from the artist’s home, palm tree branches, a tarp, hoses, and bedazzled boxing bags, form a threatening vortex. The work also recalls the makeshift shelters where the artist waited out storms as a child, resulting in a characteristic emotional richness. The more peaceful, altar-like María de los Sustentos (2021) brings together materials like casseroles, spoons, and a fishing net, alluding to the ways that Puerto Ricans sustain one another literally and metaphorically in the face of ongoing government neglect and abuse.