Shaped by industrialization, modernization campaigns, tourism, migration, and changing relationships between labor and craft, the objects sit between artisan labor, industrial production, and vernacular design. Their history remains fragmented, misrepresented, dispersed, misattributed, under-documented, or entirely omitted from dominant narratives surrounding Puerto Rican modernism and industrial design.
- 01Who made them
- 02How visual motifs circulated
- 03What systems informed them
That absence reflects colonial conditions in which cultural production is extracted, commodified, and excluded from cultural memory.
The markings incised into the pottery became a point of entry for my practice. Rather than represent historical objects, the paintings construct an intentionally unresolved language from surviving fragments—insisting that those fragments still carry presence.