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San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial 2015

4th San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial

4th San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial

Exhibitions, events, educational activities, and publications throughout Puerto Rico

24 October 2015 - 27 February 2016

Chief curator: Gerardo Mosquera

Curators: Alexia Tala, Vanessa Hernández Gracia

54 artists and groups

Photo Tour ►


Displaced Images / Images in Space

The 4th San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial: Latin America and the Caribbean is an international cultural event sponsored by the government of Puerto Rico and organized by the Fine Arts Program of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture (ICP). Created in 2004, the Triennial promotes experimentation in the graphic arts, stimulating the combination of traditional printmaking and contemporary practices within a different curatorial theme each year. This edition’s curatorial team is comprised of chief curator Gerardo Mosquera (Cuba), and co-curators Vanessa Hernández Gracia (Puerto Rico) and Alexia Tala (Chile).

It has been said that the age of Gutenberg, the age of the text, is past, and that today we live in the age of the image. But a qualifier might be in order: We live in the age of the displaced image. The current ubiquity of images has led to their transformation in almost endless ways. Images are in constant transmutation as they shift among techniques, media, contexts, and cultures. They are appropriated and re-signified —recycled— for new uses. They travel, they spread vertiginously around the world, in a visual tsunami that sweeps us up in its torrents.

The 4th Triennial examines the formal, methodological and conceptual shifts and hybridizations of the graphic image across different fields, media, backgrounds, habits, and senses, as well as its projection into three-dimensional space. The works chosen for exhibition manifest the expanded, instrumental, and decentralized nature of contemporary graphic arts—a decentralization that might lead us to speak of a post-graphic art. While the aim of the Triennial is to present the “poly”-faceted explosion in the graphic arts today, it will also include examples of traditional printmaking articulated in an expanded field. It features artists from Puerto Rico, Latin America, and the Caribbean, as well as Latino artists residing in the United States, including solo shows by Myrna Baéz, Fernando Bryce, and Carlos Garaicoa and important interventions in the public space.
See the complete list of artists

This ambitious edition of the Triennial includes exhibitions, educational activities, events, and publications throughout Puerto Rico, expanding beyond the capital city of San Juan to include spaces on the periphery and in other municipalities.

Venues

The main venues of the event are, as always, the ICP gallery spaces in the Arsenal de la Marina and Casa Blanca, both located in Old San Juan, but for the first time, the following museums, institutions, and collections join the triennial presenting other parts of the official exhibit: the Museo Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, the Caguas Museum, the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, the Museo de la Ciudad de San Juan, the Ponce Art Museum, the Josefina Camacho de la Nuez Museum and Humanistic Studies Center at the University of Turabo, and the Museum of History, Anthropology and Art at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.

In a salute to the triennial, complementary programming is presented at the Museo de las Americas, the Bayamón Art Museum, the Dr. Pio Lopez Museum at the University of Puerto Rico in Cayey, the Casa Cortés Foundation, the Ruth Hernández Torres House in Río Piedras, the Puerto Rico School of Visual Arts, the art gallery of the University of the Sacred Heart, and the Art Students League of San Juan.

Private galleries and alternative spaces are also joining the salute, including ArtLab, C787 STUDIOS, Espacio 20-20, Galería Agustina Ferreyra, Galería Yemayá, Matadero Art Gallery, Roberto Paradise, Walter Otero Contemporary Art, 2BLEO, Área: Lugar de Proyectos, Beta-Local, Departamento de la Comida, Efecto Sombrilla, La Productora , Lanchonete, Recinto Cerra, Laboratorio de Artes Binarios, Ana Mas Project (Barcelona), and El Cuadrado Gris, among many others.

Educational Program

As a fundamental part of this 4th Triennial, an educational program has been designed whose aim is to develop and nurture creative thinking through participatory activities aimed at a variety of audiences and focusing on the exploration and collective recognition of the aesthetic experience. The project features activities that go beyond looking at art and entering the classroom as passive and hierarchical experiences.

International Symposium

The highlight of the workshops and lectures was an international symposium, titled "The Contemporary Image: From Symbolic Space as Hegemony to Symbolic Space as Problematization," on October 25, 2015 in the theater of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, with panelists Luis Camnitzer, Alfredo Jaar, Mari Carmen Ramírez, Cuauhtémoc Medina, and Beatríz Santiago Muñoz, among others. This opening summit brought together internal and external audiences of the 4th Triennial, aiming at promoting a discussion of the contemporary image, and the image in general, as social experience.

(From press information)

Organizer, contact:

Institute of Puerto Rican Culture
Poly/Graphic Triennial
3 Calle La Puntilla
San Juan, 00901
Puerto Rico

Sponsored by the Government of Puerto Rico

Long live the Triennial !
Statement by Gerardo Mosquera at the opening ceremony

Examples from the photo tour:

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