A contingent of Afro Puerto Rican anti-racist activists showed up on Sunday, Nov. 19 to condemn what they are calling a discriminatory act by the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (MAPR/Puerto Rico Museum of Art).
Activists gathered in front of the MAPR building, located in the San Juan neighborhood of Santurce, to picket the museum following its recent controversial removal of a plaque that had designated one of its’ 24 galleries as the Cecilia Orta Allende Workshop Gallery.
In May of 2022, MAPR had paid homage to the artist-activist Cecilia Orta Allende when it mounted a wooden plaque with her name and likeness on it in one of its first-floor galleries.
The gallery was established in honor of Orta Allende, who was known as the “painter of the people.” During her lifetime, her artwork had been exhibited in galleries throughout Puerto Rico and Mexico. But Orta Allende was most heralded for creating what she called her “Art Gallery on Wheels” which transported her love and teaching of art to communities throughout the island––to places she felt had little access to art.
The day MAPR established the Orta Allende gallery had been celebrated with great fanfare: there was a speech given by Marta Cecilia, the artist’s niece, on behalf of her extended family and a talk from Dr. Aixa Merino, one of many Orta Allende biographers who has written about the importance of her legacy.
“The space was a gallery/workshop,” explains the artist/curator Edwin Velázquez Collazo. “There was a workshop inside what they call the Center for Educational Innovation. Next to that center, there was the gallery.” The center would go on to be used for various exhibitions: children’s art shows, works from teachers, and from the island’s department of education were all showcased. It was most recently used by Gadiel Rivera Herrera, the first winner of a Center for Educational Innovation artistic residency sponsored by the Darryl Chappell Foundation. “There was no problem with that, I was even in the gallery for that because I was an invited juror,” says Velázquez.
But by late August, visitors to MAPR noticed that someone had taken down the wooden plaque which featured Orta Allende’s name and likeness.
Velázquez, who is also the founder and director of the Casa Silvana art gallery—a space which promotes Afro Puerto Rican and Afro Latino art––and a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) said he tried to go to MAPR to see if this was true: “I went to the museum to investigate what was happening, but the museum made it a little bit impossible for me to enter that day. I don’t know why this was, because I had always entered the museum. As a member of AICA, I have my press pass and we have access to the whole museum for free. But they kept me for about 20, 30 minutes before I could enter. It was strange.” After security finally allowed him to enter, Velázquez said he saw that the rumors were true: “When I finally arrived at the space, it was true that they had put another name on the gallery. I investigated the name of that person, I photographed the plaque, I photographed the room where Cecilia’s plaque was removed, so that I could have proof and be able to write what I was going to write and then I began to investigate.”
Velázquez has spoken out to the community and press about the removal of the plaque.
MAPR’s executive director, María Cristina Gaztambide, claims that the Cecilia Orta Allende plaque has not been eliminated, just moved to another location. Because the museum expects to have more funding for the workshop center in support of Afro Latino artists, the Orta Allende plaque was placed inside the Center for Educational Innovation. “What we wanted to do was guarantee the permanence of this space,” Gaztambide told Primera Hora newspaper. “If we had kept the name Cecilia Orta, there was a possibility that she would leave us at some point.”
Anti-racist activists are not buying Gaztambide’s assertion, they contend that there had been pressure to remove Orta Allende’s name since the day the plaque was initially mounted. A former museum staffer said that after the first artist’s residency was completed, there was pressure to remove the plaque from the gallery. Now the Cecilia Orta Allende Gallery features the name of Valeria Antonia Carrión Benítez, the only daughter of museum donors Gloria Benítez and José Carrion III (a former president of the island’s Fiscal Oversight Board).
The November 19 picketing in front of MAPR was to show that the ad-hoc Afro Puerto Rican Movement wants accountability for the plaque’s removal. Velázquez marched outside the museum along with Gloriann Sacha Antonetty-Lebrón, founder and editor of the magazine Revista étnica; María Reinat Pumarejo, co-founder of the anti-racist Colectivo Ilé organization; María Luisa Cortijo of Colectivo El Ancón de Loíza; and other prominent Afro Puerto Ricans.
The demonstrators were met with three patrols of police, 10 of them on motorcycles. But the anti-riot police show of force did not dissuade the protestors.
“The museum is claiming that her name is now on a space within the center. But it’s only going to be in a corner within the Center for Educational Innovation,” said Velázquez. “That is not the same because that is a way of making her invisible; Cecilia Orta is going to be inside of a space that already has a name. It’s not like before, when there was a gallery called Cecilia Orta that had its own space, that did its own activities.
“This is a museum in the area of Santurce, the only town founded by Blacks in Puerto Rico. It later became a neighborhood, a part of San Juan, but it was the only town founded by Blacks in Puerto Rico. To have MAPR commit this act of not being able to recognize a Black artist in Santurce and acknowledge her relationship with the community is discriminatory.”
The absence of Afro-Boricua contributors in museums both on the island and in the US is glaringly obvious. I’m glad that local organizations have called them out on it. We are grudgingly included and unceremoniously erased once the spotlight goes elsewhere. I totally support my fellow Puerto Rican artists who have raised their fists and their voices in calling out this injustice.