HomeComing at the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture September 2014

A homecoming is an American tradition celebrated for more than a hundred years. The homecoming events included rallies, parades, speeches and dances with the intention to reunite those that departed and to create a stronger sense of pride. Homecomings are widely celebrated in the month of September as the fall settles and new opportunities flourish.

But, for many Puerto Ricans living in the Diaspora a homecoming event can have a very nostalgic connotation.  As our sense of belonging is transformed by a different reality, is just become imperative to reconstruct memories and build from an illusion a home in a distant paradise. For the close to five million of Puerto Ricans outside of the Island having a national museum contributes to build a stronger sense of pride and identity, reaffirm our capacity to educate through our arts and develop a sensibility to the greater world around us.

With the birth of a ‘Puerto Rican Museum’ the possibility to collect, study, preserve and showcase the arts and ideas of people that are sharing a transnational reality is simply transformative. The collective need for a sanctuary continue bringing us together, from the creation of a Paseo Boricua crafted between two immense flags and beyond. The collective need of a sanctuary helps future generations to preserve what is created now; it also helps us transcend in a revolutionary way inclusive of people all ages, all backgrounds and all ethnicities.

At the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture we are particularly proud to celebrate the Home Coming of Puerto Rican people and artists in the city of Chicago and the nation. We celebrate this transformative space, as it grows with each one of us as a sanctuary for cultural preservation, education and inspiration.

The exhibition Home Coming at the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture suggest a phenomenal opportunity to foster a positive critical dialogue about preservation and art production in the Diaspora through a series of proposals by contemporary Puerto Rican artists that had carved an extraordinary path as artists, as cultural workers and educators in the city of Chicago.

The first edition of Home Coming features seven conceptual artists that highlight this need of a critical reflection about self and collective preservation that is quite complex and often misinterpreted. Artists Bibiana Suarez, Candida Alvarez, Dzine, Edra Soto, Jose Lerma, Josue Pellot and Nora M. Nieves have assimilated through their featured proposals a process of healing broken connections that are both personal and reflective of the collective memory. They opted to reconstruct preconceived images, spaces and tensions through a new context, space, time that is continuously forced to fade.

As a collective, their artwork coexists organically, but somehow provoking the audience through a conceited friction between art production and a resistance for assimilation. The artwork speaks of an incredible tradition of crafting new meanings through the transformation of objects sometimes as ordinary as a table napkin, a Sunday horse ride, opening a news paper, kitchen tiles, being lost in translation or a hyper advertised good. In general, this proposals in context help us understand the brutal reality of how we consume, produce and assimilate our culture. Cultural preservation becomes subversive and revolutionary that is both nostalgic and evocative it unites us, and transforms us as we collectively continue undergoing a divided sense of belonging.

We are humbled by the positive opportunities to continue learning as we grow as a museum and world-class institution for the development of Puerto Rican artists nationwide. The showcase of such remarkable visual proposals through our first show at the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture speaks for itself, of the genuine commitment for the sustainability and preservation of our community and historical legacy in the city of Chicago and beyond.