Para Don Pedro is astonishingly powerful both as art and as social document, attesting to the early political insights in Sánchez’s efforts. Swirling about Campos there exist many spirals, a symbol regularly used by the Taino, the indigenous people who inhabited Puerto Rico. In the remarkable lithograph, photolithograph, and collage named Para Don Pedro (1992), Sánchez offers the viewer a notable image: in the center, a photographic reproduction of Campos, the voice for Puerto Rican independence, with a framing that depends on a commercial portrayal of Jesus in a red robe in the four corners of the composition. ![]() The paintings themselves are marvelous multimedia presentations of a sensibility informed by the past and the present, by the cultural and the social, and by traditional and current formalities (figuration and abstraction). For those participating in the New York art world, the combination of political adamancy, strong feeling, and even religious allusion may stand outside the vaunted American attributes of abstraction and formalism and egoistic assertion, but this is an obvious mistake-indeed, Sánchez speaks quickly of his strong interest in abstract expressionism and, later, conceptual art. Often, too, we see a cross in his work-while we do not know if the artist is an active Catholic, it is clear he accepts the role of Christianity in his culture. He is capable of unusually moving passages of feeling-a linear heart surrounding a photograph of a baby, for example. It must be recognized that this Nuyorican artist is as committed to the homeland of his family as much as he is active in New York.Īt the same time, to see Sánchez only as a political prophet would not recognize the breadth of his achievement. ![]() But the oppositions he has had to face, evident in his work, has made his vision stronger, more available as a public insight. Sánchez is an early, and highly successful, proponent of an art that would be true to the concerted array of truths he has had to live with, not all of them positive. In fact, the United States is composed, happily or not so happily, of many mixed identities, whose psychic and artistic complexities and differences are starting to be regularly investigated. But they are also more than that, being an introduction to the colonial history that has beset Puerto Rico for a long time-thus, Sánchez works as a witness to a culture in need of greater recognition.Ĭultural immersion is not easily achieved, nor is it desirable for some. Sánchez’s collages, which introduce photos, usually with social content, into the composition, can be seen as part of his graphic inheritance. But, even so, his work displays the graphic achievement that is traditionally a strength of Latino art, in Puerto Rico particularly. One of his great gifts is his refusal to incorporate any easy content into his art. The art stands as an enterprise in independence, rather than succumbing to the blandishments of the dominant culture in which Sánchez works and lives.Īt this moment in time, when events are yet again proving how deeply prejudicial the American fabric remains, it becomes more important than ever to record the artistic efforts of someone like Sánchez, who mediates his origins with the academic legacies he has been trained in (not to mention his visits to city museums and galleries). The political situation does not look like it will be solved soon, but the cultural productivity of an artist like Sánchez can be remarked upon and supported, as a way of identifying both the output of a highly gifted artist but also the art of a sensibility that remains adamantly Latino. So it is fair to see Sánchez, even in a relatively mature segment of his life and art, as a supporter of a place and culture that has been forcibly relegated to a marginal status. His oeuvre embodies questions of commitment, especially in regard to the tattered identity of Puerto Rico, which remain ongoing. Sánchez grew up during a time of fierce social and political upheaval, and he has remained true to his experience, even as he has been increasingly accepted by art’s mainstream. His work, consisting of paintings, printmaking, and photography and video, has often been politically oriented his paintings include photos of Latin American social heroes such as Che Guevara and Pedro Albizu Campos, an important initial supporter of Puerto Rican independence, who spent years in jail for his beliefs. Although the artist has been based in New York for many years-he is a professor of art at Hunter College-he remains closely tied to his Puerto Rican cultural legacy. ![]() His Puerto Rican parents took part in the wave of immigration from the Island to the United States in the 1940s and ‘50s Sánchez was born in Brooklyn and raised in New York, where he was educated in art at Cooper Union. The artist Juan Sánchez is an established name in contemporary art.
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