The Whitney Museum is Offering Free Admission on Earth Day to See a Unique Exhibit About Puerto Rico: Here’s How

NEW YORK – In November, one of New York City’s museums became the venue to show for the first time in nearly 50 years at a major institution in the country a unique exhibit that touches the hearts of Puerto Ricans and New Yorkers alike. -Yorkers. And people will have one day to enjoy it for free.

It’s all about exposureThere Are No People After the Hurricane: Puerto Rican Art After Hurricane Maria“, in the Whitney Museum of American Artwhich will be on display until April 23, 2023. However, the museum will offer free admission to all visitors on Saturday, April 22, to celebrate Earth Day during its final exhibition weekend.

During this weekend, the museum will offer three open exhibitions which deal in part with the environment, climate change and the relationship with the earth. These include:

• NOTthere is a poshuracan worldthe first exhibition of Puerto Rican art by a major American museum in over fifty years, which ends April 23.
• Yellow quick to see Smith: Memory card (Map of Memory), celebrates five decades of artwork by innovative artist Jaune Quick-To-See Smith. The exhibition offers a new framework for considering contemporary Native American art by exploring pressing issues of land, racism and cultural preservation. It opens on April 19.
• Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century (Project for a New American Century), the first American museum retrospective of the work of Josh Kline, spanning 15 years and including early installations and moving images addressing the urgency of the climate crisis. It opens on April 19.

In addition, from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., there will be a show for which no reservation is required, related to climate change and aimed at minors in the Hess Family Theater there Hearst Art Space on the third floor of the museum. The program will be taught by the New York artist of There is no post-hurricane world, Gabriela Salazar, whose exterior installation Complaint uses coffee, historically Puerto Rico’s most important crop, to explore how the islands of the Archipelago and Manhattan are connected and vulnerable to rising sea levels. Families are invited to join Salazar for experimenting with coffee clay to create works inspired by his installation and artistic practice.

Free tickets for April 22 will be available while supplies last. Advance purchase of tickets is recommended; visit whitney.org/tickets.

Whitney’s Activity Guide for Children (in English and Spanish) also offers families the opportunity to independently explore the themes of the exhibit. there is no post-hurricane world.

“Art is a powerful way to deal with complex issues,” says Cris Scorza, Helena Rubinstein Chair in Education. The Whitney is a safe space for discussion, debate and reflection. We encourage all New Yorkers to visit us this Earth Day, free of charge, to experience the many ways artists address climate change, the earth and the environment through their work.”

What is the exhibition on Puerto Rico about?

To date, thousands of visitors have already seen there is no post-hurricane world: Puerto Rican Art After Hurricane Maria which opened on November 23, 2022 and was curated by DeMartini family curator Marcela Guerrero. The exhibition brings together an intergenerational group of twenty artists from Puerto Rico and its diaspora whose work responds to the five years of transformation that have passed since Hurricane Maria, a high-level category four storm that hit the archipelago. September 20, 2017. Over 50 works, these artists address the great devastation exacerbated by the historical events that preceded and followed this watershed moment.

This becomes the first academic exhibition of contemporary Puerto Rican art, presented by a major American museum, in nearly half a century.

The exhibition takes its title from a poem by the Puerto Rican poet Raquel Salas Rivera, presented in the exhibition as one of the works. Through painting, video, installation, performance, poetry, and newly commissioned works created for this exhibition, the exhibit examines the five years since Hurricane Maria to highlight pressing concerns in Puerto Rico. . These include the trauma created by collapsing infrastructure, the devastation of ecological histories and landscapes, loss, reflection and mourning, resistance and protest, and the economic migration of Puerto Ricans to the United States. , a consequence of the economy, during the boom in American tourism and relocation to the island.

The artists in the exhibition seek to analyze the fractures left by the storm in the very fabric of Puerto Rican politics, culture and society. The exhibition includes works by: Candida Alvarez, Gabriella N. Báez, Rogelio Báez Vega, Sofía Córdova, Danielle De Jesús, Frances Gallardo, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Miguel Luciano, Javier Orfón, Elle Pérez, Gamaliel Rodríguez, Raquel Salas Rivera, Gabriela Salazar, Armig Santos, Garvin Sierra Vega, Edra Soto, Awilda Sterling-Duprey, Yiyo Tirado Rivera, Gabriella Torres-Ferrer and Lulu Varona.

“The group of artists in this exhibit invites us to understand the historical, physical, and political forces that have shaped Puerto Rico and to acknowledge our own responsibility and vulnerability,” said Adam D. Weinberg. “Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria is a harbinger of things to come for the most vulnerable, not just in the Caribbean but around the world.”

On September 7, 2017, Hurricane Irma passed Puerto Rico, followed by Hurricane Maria, which made landfall less than two weeks later. The crises that had built up before the hurricanes massively intersected with the events that followed Maria. Economic austerity measures that had been implemented in Puerto Rico just a year before the storms prolonged a lack of investment in infrastructure, a political scandal sparked mass protests that resulted in the impeachment of the governor Ricardo Roselló in the summer of 2019 and a series of earthquakes and tremors destroyed homes and schools in the southern part of the archipelago in early 2020, just months before the arrival of COVID-19.

Recovery from both the storms and subsequent events continues to be hampered by continued power outages, school closures, and rising housing costs created by mass gentrification.

“There is no post-hurricane world it proposes that imagining a new Puerto Rico is, without a doubt, in the work of artists,” said Guerrero, who worked closely while planning the exhibit and visited his studios across the United States. Continental States and Puerto Rico, where he was born. “The future of self-determination is inherently a creative act. Art can support a post-hurricane, post-austerity, post-earthquake and post-pandemic world. This exhibition is a call to see the living and an invitation to pay homage to the dead.”

The exhibition examines artists’ responses to the transformative events of the past five years, in five thematic sections: fractured infrastructure, critique of tourism, treatment of loss, mourning and reflection, ecology and landscape, resistance and protest.

How to book my tickets

To see this exhibit in its final weeks, visitors can purchase tickets at whitney.org. In addition to free admission on April 22, Infants and teenagers are free to enter the Whitney, and members can enter at any time by showing their card. The Museum also offers other free entry offers and at a reduced price, including the Friday evening voluntary contribution.

For more information on this exhibition go here.

FOR OTHER NEW YORK CITY MUSEUMS WITH FREE TICKETS, GO HERE.