Through Catastrophe, and into Community, the art of Daniel Lind-Ramos

I often recall large museum collections of new art for a single standout entry. In the case of the 2019 Whitney Biennale, the memory of a royal enigmatic sculpture titled “María-María” by Puerto Rican artist Daniel Lind-Ramos won’t let go.

Standing just over six feet tall, it was a semi-abstract assemblage-style female figure, her body draped in a sea-blue cloak, her head an oval without a face, her long thin arms bent down as if open to embrace. The materials she was composed of were unusual, especially in a Whitney context. The head was a lacquered coconut; her oceanic cloak was a plastic FEMA tarpaulin.

All this, along with the resounding title, suggested a weave of clashing cultural and political references: to the benign Christian figure of the Virgin Mary, to the moody Afro-Caribbean sea goddess Yemaya; and the murderous storm that devastated Puerto Rico two years earlier.

Whatever the significance of the work, Whitney’s curators accurately assessed its power. They set it apart from everything else, as if it were on an altar, in a west-facing alcove-like window, with open skies and the Hudson River as a backdrop.

Now, four years later, the artist’s work is once again on display at a New York City museum, this time at MoMA PS 1 and completely solo in a fantastic terrestrial and celestial mystery tour of an exhibition called “Daniel Lind-Ramos: El Viejo Griot – Una Historia de Todos Nosotros (The Elder Storyteller – A Story of Us All).”

The show opens with a boat – a full size salvaged wooden bow. It’s come to rest on a blue tarpaulin sea, it’s packed with cargo—coconuts, conga drums, plastic buckets for storage or storage—and buried under piles of burlap cargo sacks.

The boat’s name, El Viejo Griot, refers to a mythical character, a keeper and teller of histories, who appears annually in masked carnival-like performances in the Puerto Rican coastal town of Loíza, where 70-year-old Lind-Ramos was born. lives and works.

About 20 miles from San Juan, the city was originally inhabited by free blacks and escaped slaves. It remains a politically marginalized community of black Puerto Ricans, Afrodescendientes – Lind-Ramos being one – and a vital center of the island’s Afro-Caribbean culture.

We don’t know what exactly is in the luggage bags of the boat. But each is stamped with a date significant in the five centuries under colonial rule of the island, from a rebellion by the native Taino people against Spanish invaders in 1511; to thwarting a British attack in 1797; to the invasion of the United States in 1898; and finally the 2017 hurricane that left the island, a US Commonwealth, to its fate.

The crippling reality of the storm, which was followed in 2020 by a series of earthquakes and Covid-19, permeates much of the work, some of which consists of abandoned debris. A recently completed sculpture called “Ambulancia” refers to all three disasters. A frayed, hand-propelled juggernaut of car parts, emergency lights, discarded shoes, a feather-stripped mattress, and a wheelbarrow to transport the dead.

The effects of colonialism can be pervasively specific. (“Ambulancia” is, among other things, about meeting repeated emergencies when resources are scarce and humanitarian aid is withheld.) But they can also be global and deep, as suggested in the artist’s series of Marian-themed sculptures.

The 2019 Whitney Biennale preview isn’t on the show, but three other “Maria” pieces are. One, “Baño de María (Bain-Marie/The Cleansing),” focuses on industrially induced global warming that is driving erratic storms and rising seas to island-drowning levels. A second piece, “María Guabancex”, is named after the tantrum-prone Taino goddess of wind and chaos, whose destructive fury, fueled by climate change, is expressed as a furious sculptural swirl of ropes, cables and palm branches.

The title of a third work, “María de los Sustentos (Mary of the Feeding)”, seems to refer to the Mother of Jesus. But the sculptural image Lind-Ramos has come up with feels much less like a Spanish Catholic import than a local household invention, as it is, carefully assembled from pots and pans, fishing nets, farm implements, ancillary tools of everyday life in the Loíza community.

This community, which began and continues to be a haven for migrants of African descent who found little welcome elsewhere, is the main source and subject of Lind-Ramos’ art. He has occasionally lived elsewhere – he studied art in New York and Paris – but has always returned. And the sculptures in the exhibition are essentially about it.

This is certainly materially true. Each instance of this brilliantly conceived monumental art is composed of fragments of that world. This includes the show’s earliest work, “Armario de la Memoria (Cupboard of Memory)” (2012), in which hard-used hoes and machetes flank aged but lovingly preserved entertainment equipment (a TV monitor, a DVD player. And it is for the piece from 2020 called “Figura Emisaria (The Emissary)”, which, among other things, enshrines an old-style yuca rasp, a gift to the artist from an elderly neighbor.

Loíza and Black Puerto Rico are present in all this.

In a reversal of earlier critical views of Lind-Ramos’ art, the tendency now seems to be to regard it emphatically as ‘political’, which of course it is, and to avoid the idea of ​​calling it ‘spiritual’, not even belittle. ‘Whatever it is. We’ve come to think that these descriptions are somehow mutually exclusive, but they don’t fit the culture that Lind-Ramos so diligently captures. And how could they be in any art that is above all a celebration of genii loci, spirits of place?

And speaking of place, the work looks great in MoMA PS 1. There, the exhibition’s organizers—Kate Fowle, guest curator, and Ruba Katrib and Elena Ketelsen González of MoMA PS1—have given the sculptures ample space and arranged them on a processional route that maximizes the power of sheer visual surprise of an idea-rich art, which is what drew me to that piece in Whitney five years ago, and has kept it alive in my mind.

Daniel Lind-Ramos: El Viejo Griot — Una Historia de Todos Nosotros

through September 4, MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, (718) 784-2084); momaps1.org.