America’s Cultural Treasures: This article is part of a series sponsored by the Ford Foundation highlighting the work of museums and organizations that have made a significant impact on the cultural landscape of the United States.
“Puerto Rico’s lack of definition has created doubts about who we are, how valuable we are, and it was my opportunity, through the museum, to create a sense of pride and warmth.”
Doreen Colón Camacho, Founder of the Education Department at El Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico
The room doesn’t look like it’s inside a prison. It’s painted a hopeful color — light blue with white trim along the molding. There is a teacher’s desk with blunt, angled, metal legs and faded light green paint along the sides and top. It is close to the chalkboard, while all the smaller, tablet arm school desks are fanned out from it. Raúl Reyes Chalas sits in one of them. Javier Rodríguez sits next to him, facing the other people in the room who include Puerto Rico’s former secretary of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Ana Escobar Pabón; Dr. María C. Gaztambide, the executive director of El Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico or MAPR); and a long-time trustee of the museum, Mariam Guillemard. Three armed guards stand outside.
Reyes Chalas begins telling his story. He’s asked by Gaztambide whether he is Puerto Rican. “I don’t know what I am, honestly; I don’t know,” he says. On his mother’s side, he knows that her people are from Turkey. The father is unmentioned. He was born in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to Puerto Rico when he was six years old. He continued to live there and then joined the United States Marine Corps. He doesn’t have to say this. The tattoo on his arm of a dagger thrust south through a heart seated on a lettered background of “USMC” tells that part of his story for him. Nevertheless, Reyes Chalas admits: “I joined the Marines, and in the Marine Corps they told me I was Mexican or Puerto Rican, not Dominican.” He continues, describing joining as “the mistake of my life.” “I’ve seen some horrible stuff,” he says.
Reyes Chalas also doesn’t have to tell us that he’s been to some dark places, or that he battles the feeling of hopelessness that pervades the walls and floor, because as he speaks, his eyes seem to be constantly welling up. He divulges that a particular Jesuit priest, the late Fernando Picó Bauermeister, a key historian of Puerto Rico who passed away in 2017, worked with him, Rodríguez, and others incarcerated at Bayamón Correctional Complex who were interested in furthering their education. According to Reyes Chalas, Picó started a program that allowed people to earn their bachelor’s degrees while incarcerated — a bachelor’s in general studies that took him and Rodríguez between seven and eight years to earn. This initiative was a life vest tossed to slowly drowning men.
This work made him useful to himself. “With him, we had to read a book every week and at the end of the week we had to write an essay,” Reyes Chalas recalls. “We read 68 books before he died.”
Now that they have achieved their first academic degree, their ambitions have grown. Reyes Chalas wants to go to the University of Salamanca in Spain to earn his doctorate at one of the most esteemed schools of philosophy. He wrote his undergraduate thesis examining a local heavy metal band called Calamity using “Heideggerian hermeneutics, an analysis of the lyrics of their songs.” Rodríguez wants to create a podcast about athletes from previous generations so that their memories are not lost. Both of them hope that in a few months they will be allowed to enter a program to earn their master’s degrees.
It’s November of 2023, and Reyes Chalas, Rodríguez, and everyone else present are in the room because Gaztambide is gathering information about how the museum might partner with the Correctional Educational Institute of Bayamón Correctional Complex to restart their program Arte que Rehabilita (translating to “art that rehabilitates/restores”), which ran from 2009 to 2013. When Gaztambide became the executive director in April of 2023, she began probing how the museum might reopen the program, honoring to the organization’s mission to meet the needs of populations both visible and hidden across the island.
“Before the hurricanes in 2017, we had a longstanding program impacting inmates. They receive education in art workshops at certain prisons,” she explains. “We’re trying to reactivate that and the specific reason we’re working at that facility is they are currently piloting an arts-focused rehabilitation program.”
But the museum doesn’t only seek to intervene in people’s lives after they have found themselves in irrevocable situations. They also run programs intended to address educational needs at an early stage. Their Art, Ecology and Sustainability program found a partner in the Central High School for Visual Arts in Santurce, which is within walking distance of the museum. The students work with an artist to make both art and the materials of which it is composed, including culling pigments from plants grown for this purpose in the school’s garden, which is maintained by both students and teachers.
“It’s full-circle, because the students are involved in the planting and the upkeep of the garden, learn how to extract the pigment and make the paint, and then create their works,” Gaztambide says. “It’s a yearlong program, and it culminates at the end of the school year with a show of the work [at the museum].”
The central idea is that interceding at an early stage in children’s lives will give them the tools to fashion a life that follows their ambitions. They combine the practical skills required to cultivate and maintain a garden with the ability to transmute the raw resources of plant matter into pigments, with the creativity to construct images that are vehicles of the imagination. As a result, the world becomes a little more available, and these students can see a place for themselves in it.
One of the people who was key in positioning the museum as an educational partner to underserved populations is Doreen Colón Camacho, the former founding director of MAPR’s Education Department, whom Gaztambide brought back on an interim capacity as the museum reinvigorated its educational program following years of hurricane- and pandemic-related inactivity. Prior to taking on the role in 1996, she said, she was hired by the government of Puerto Rico to write the museum’s “working documents for the bylaws and conservation policies, education policies, and philosophy.” When the museum opened in 2000, she was offered the job to establish the Education Department by then-Director Dr. Carmen Ruiz-Fischler. Colón Camacho is motivated by the knowledge that, as she attests, “between 48 and 58% of the island’s population is of ‘low-income level.’” According to the United States Census of 2020, the median household income in Puerto Rico is $25,621 and about 39.6% of residents live in poverty. Coming of age in Puerto Rico, Colón Camacho recognizes that for this population, “Visiting museums is not their first option for enjoyment.”
Then, as now, Colón Camacho and her colleagues set about making themselves indispensable resources for students and teachers so that their intervention could happen where some are most receptive: in the classroom, under the demands of academic assignments. She says, “There is a very poor education system in Puerto Rico, which I am really embarrassed to recognize.” To compensate, under Colón Camacho’s direction, the museum developed lesson plans, stories, histories, and general data and invited teachers and schools to use the museum essentially as an extension of their classrooms. “We have a menu that we offer teachers that they can select from,” she reveals.
In this way, the museum was considered, by the founders and key staff such as Colón Camacho, a trusted partner for teachers to get their students to see learning as a life-long project to counteract the dysfunctional school system.
The current library director, Dorilyn Morales Colón, confirms this, explaining that the museum provides teachers with rubrics, lesson plans, and other materials they can bring back to their classrooms. “They can be integrated into the curriculum of the public schools, and they are for every discipline: English, math, science, Spanish, social studies — and by levels, from pre-kindergarten to high school,” she says.
Morales Colón, who was hired by Doreen Colón Camacho, came to the museum after spending 14 years in business administration. She is excited by the curiosity of the visitors who come to the museum in person with inquiries or email her questions (which she estimates average about 160 per month), because she understands that there are few places the public can go to get answers.
At one point, she was a freelance employee and often worked in public libraries and Borders bookstores to take advantage of their WiFi. Morales Colón says that Borders was a treasured part of the island because the company provided stores in which visitors could sit and read without being obligated to purchase anything. When Borders went bankrupt in 2011, their absence was deeply felt. “We didn’t have public libraries anywhere near our area,” Morales Colón said. “That’s the reason I always emphasize that there’s no need to pay the entrance of the museum to use the facility.” She sees her role at the museum as making educational resources available to whoever needs them, regardless of whether they can afford the entry fee.
Helping MAPR carry out this work is the Fundación Ángel Ramos (the Ángel Ramos Foundation). The organization was founded in 1958, with a central commitment to early childhood education. According to the current president of the foundation, Roberto Santa María, their arts program trains artists who will pass on their knowledge to young students. “We wanted to improve social mobility through education and certain other elements, but more geared to those early years,” he says.
Since the museum opened in 2000, the Ángel Ramos Foundation has provided significant financial support, including funding an interactive space on the second floor that’s designed to engage children and their caregivers. The ActivArte Gallery, which was inaugurated in 2001 and renovated in 2012, features paintings, drawings, and sculptures alongside analog and digital didactic materials that break down the meanings artists are exploring in their work.
In addition, an essential thing that the foundation does is recognize the interconnectedness of MAPR’s educative programs and the cultivation of a cadre of artists who make them come alive. The Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico knows that their alliances with artists are key to making the institution useful to their community, so they created a position for an officer who is responsible for nurturing artists.
Annie Y. Saldaña Matías first came to the museum in 2008, hired by Colón Camacho as a gallery assistant and educator. By 2022, Saldaña Matías had become the project coordinator for another museum program underwritten by the Ángel Ramos Foundation, managing the integration of Puerto Rican visual arts into the preschool curriculum. Since then, she has become the manager of the recently re-launched Centro de Desarrollo para la Comunidad Creativa (Creative Community Development Center or CEDE).
“[It] is meant to support and visualize our visual artists within the collection, but also visual artists from the island — not only Puerto Ricans, but a person from outside who does live here,” she confirms. “It’s meant to provide workshops, and the department also has an emergency grant for artists, which would usually be for any medical situations artists might have.”
Through these emergency grants, the social safety net becomes a little sturdier underneath artists who are connected in this way to the museum. And recognizing that artists’ abilities to grow in their craft and negotiate the arts ecosystem is compulsory for their success, the museum offers them workshops that provide the knowledge and practical competencies they need. According to Saldaña Matías, CEDE has “offered 55 seminars and workshops directed toward capacity building for artists: how to do taxes, a portfolio, and proposals for museums or gallery spaces.”
“Academia can only get you so far, and it’ll train you in techniques and developing cohesive projects and stuff like that, but the whole entrepreneurship and the business of the arts is always missing,” she continued.
The museum comprehends that they are training the trainers; that by supporting artists, not only do the artists benefit, but everyone else the artists touch benefits as well. Understanding this, Saldaña Matías seeks to proclaim and raise the profiles of the artists they work with and help them forge connections with other institutions, including maintaining a directory of artists in the collection and the island more broadly on the museum’s website.
The artist directory gives visitors, arts professionals, and researchers a way to see what is happening generally on the island in the arts. It also enables a lifeline between these artists and the institutions outside of Puerto Rico, which is often regarded as a venue for pleasure-seeking play, rather than a space that produces intellectually sophisticated opportunities for growth.
“We are not a provincial museum,” says the museum’s curator, Juan Carlos López Quintero. “You think of Puerto Rico, you think about beaches, mountains, and rum and parties and a good time. Great. It’s true, but we have a very important culture.”
López Quintero has a unique perspective on how Puerto Rico is regarded outside its borders since he is an immigrant himself. In 2008, he came to MAPR from his post as chief curator of the National Art Gallery in Caracas, Venezuela, and has been leading the curatorial department since then. He believes that the paramount roles the museum needs to play are, one, to produce knowledge about local artists, and two, to take the collections and exhibitions containing the work of these artists to institutions abroad. He observes:
“The literature on art in Puerto Rico is quite minimal, which is a problem. We don’t have many critics of art. We don’t have many historians dedicated to our particular areas, and [since] we are the national museum, we are responsible in terms of the history [of art] in Puerto Rico. So, we have been doing many catalogs and books because we realize this is some essential part of our history. We have to write it down, otherwise it’s not remembered.”
During the past 15 years he has been at MAPR, López Quintero has organized 46 exhibitions, which he says is a record. His urgency stems from his sense that Puerto Rico needs to escape the swirling vortex of transactional tourism that renders the island a tropical bacchanal in the popular imagination. López Quintero works against this current by delving into historical analysis. “Art is not like entertainment culture. Art is part of our heritage,” he adds. “We are one of the oldest colonies in the world. That’s why I think we have to do exhibitions that are, in terms of history, very robust. People come from abroad to visit our island and they [may] change their minds, say, ‘No, no, that’s not just a tropical paradise; it goes beyond what I thought. It is more profound, more complex.’”
The complexity of the culture has everything to do with its history. As María Gaztambide maintained, “Like the other islands in the Caribbean, we are a crossroads, a space where people from multiple backgrounds have lived and worked, shaping new cultures and new environments. We are a heterogeneous society made up of people who are racially, ethnically, and culturally mixed.” In her own family, she says, this heterogeneity is evident: “I have ancestors who were poor or indentured Whites, land-owning Whites, slaves, wealthy Blacks who could pass, Spaniards, Africans, Indigenous Taínos, Creoles, mestizos, mulattos … you name it.”
Puerto Rico is, at the same time, also among the last outposts of the Spanish Empire, which existed from 1492 to 1976 and covered five million square miles at its greatest expanse — one of the largest empires in recorded history. In 1898, the United States took control of the island in the wake of the Spanish-American War, and it now officially holds commonwealth status with residents, who are American citizens, able to travel back and forth freely to the US mainland. However, as Gaztambide points out, this status is more appearance than reality: “There’s no self-determination for Puerto Ricans. It’s the US Congress that determines our status. Even though Puerto Rico doesn’t feel like it’s a colony, at the end of the day it really is.”
In many ways, Puerto Rico is a place that lies between places, and thus its identity and that of its residents can be difficult to define. MAPR staff see their responsibility as giving their community the tools by which to embrace, explore, and comprehend this identity.
The museum acts as a key institution in the effort to record, keep, and safeguard the histories that are being written, as well as the objects through which some histories are told. In 2017, Hurricane Maria swept across the island and devastated Puerto Rico, causing approximately 4,645 deaths and about $91.61 billion in damage. It is the deadliest and costliest hurricane to ever strike the island, and in addition to causing flooding and a critical lack of resources, the hurricane also precipitated a blackout that persisted for several months — the worst electrical blackout in the island’s history. According to Melba Acosta, MAPR’s treasurer and a member of the board of trustees, during that desperate time, the museum housed several public collections from institutions that were damaged by the storm. It maintained a climate-controlled environment by running generators to replace the lost electrical power.
The island had barely recovered from the hurricane when it was afflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic, crippling the distribution of goods and most industries around the world, including the tourism industry of Puerto Rico. While the island was experiencing that devastation, it was hit by a cluster of earthquakes that destroyed the homes of thousands of people and generated financial losses estimated at $3.1 billion. Yet somehow, the museum has endured. And it has done so as a private institution, one created but minimally supported by the government in a space where the government is often regarded with distrust.
Acosta outlined the story of the museum’s origins as beginning with the Government Development Bank for Puerto Rico (GDB), an organization that no longer exists. It was established under then-Governor Pedro Juan Rosselló González. The GDB financed the construction of MAPR and established it at the site of San Juan’s old Municipal Hospital. A group of people then convened as an independent nonprofit, the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Inc., who were in charge of the institution. After winding down its operations in 2016, the GDB transferred the property to a trust. Gaztambide adds that this situation leaves the museum in a state of profound precariousness.
“The property was transferred without any support or funding for the upkeep and maintenance of its 130,000-square-foot and 2.6-acre facility,” she says. “We face an exorbitant cost of energy and utilities payable to the local government. Coupled with catastrophic insurance, these expenses total nearly $2 million per year, exceeding the operating budgets of many cultural institutions on the mainland.”
“In other words, we literally turn around and pay the local government far more than the irregular support that we, along with other nonprofits in Puerto Rico, receive from them,” she continues. “This skewed equation highlights the precariousness (an eternal survival mode) of Puerto Rican cultural institutions.”
Despite this precarity, the museum learned to trust the artists and curators, teachers, and historians who are the leading agents reaching out to those at the core of their mission: all who are interested in being educated, in coming to know themselves.
Raúl Reyes Chalas has a sentence of 119 years to serve. For the museum, he is not the person to give up on. Reyes Chalas is worth the struggle and effort just as much as the children who learn to make paint pigments from plants. Several weeks after Gaztambide’s visit to Bayamón Correctional Complex, she learned that both Reyes Chalas and Rodríguez were authorized to pursue their master’s degrees while serving their sentences.
Gaztambide reports that the museum ended up restarting Arte que Rehabilita, but it took nearly a year for the Department of Corrections to approve the contract and MAPR was only able to hold workshops at the complex from November to December 2024. The inmates petitioned for the museum to continue. However, with the change in administration, the Department of Corrections rejected MAPR’s invoices for services rendered three times. As of this writing, the museum still has not been reimbursed for its services and investment.
It is a question raised by the work of artists shown by the museum, a question that confronts us like a rushing wind: Who might we become when we look deeply into ourselves and each other with rigor and curiosity? Morales Colón recalls being “so, so amazed” by her own experience discovering the artists of Puerto Rico. For her that encounter was transformative, allowing her to realize that “we have to continue working for them, to expose them to the arts, because everyone can find something.” And more to the point, everyone can find something important in art, at any stage, at any moment in their lives.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.