STREETERVILLE — You can’t talk about Puerto Rico’s complex history with the United States without including Chicago.
From the 1966 Division Street Riots to the creation of the Young Lords, the city has been at the center of Puerto Rico’s fight for liberation and social justice for over 60 years.
This story has been told in the news and history books but is also intertwined with the work of Puerto Rican artists in Chicago’s diaspora.
“entre horizontes,” a new exhibition opening Saturday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave., aims to refocus Chicago as a center of Puerto Rican activism, self-determination and a training ground for artists.
Curator Carla Acevedo-Yates, from San Juan, Puerto Rico, told Block Club the exhibition has been four years in the making.
With no graduate programs for studio art available in Puerto Rico, artists are forced to migrate to the United States in order to pursue their degrees, said Acevedo-Yates. For decades, that has created a hub of Puerto Rican artists flowing into the city to attend the Art Institute of Chicago.
Well-known Puerto Rican artists who attended the Art Institute include Bibiana Suárez, Arnaldo Roche Rabell and Edra Soto.
The MCA also has the largest, most extensive public collection of works by Rafael Ferrer, a famous painter and multimedia artist from Santurce, Puerto Rico. Ferrer is known for his work centering on life in the Caribbean.
“Doing all that research and that archival history of the MCA … Puerto Rican art is in the DNA of this institution, but also, Puerto Ricans are in the DNA of the city. This has been a history that has not been told in this institution,” Acevedo-Yates said.
The 17 artists in “entre horizontes” are Puerto Rican and have some type of relationship to the city, whether professional, educational or familial.
The name of the show, which in English means “between horizons,” plays on the horizon line that connects Chicago and Puerto Rico over the waters of Lake Michigan and the Caribbean.
Puerto Rico became a Unites States colonial territory in 1898 at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War. In 1917 President Woodrow Wilson signed the Jones Shafroth Act granting Puerto Ricans citizenship. This kept the island under its colonial status while making those who live there eligible for the military draft, but not eligible to vote in presidential elections or have a voting representative in Congress. This is still current today.
“That sort of sets a type of conceptual framework for the exhibition. I feel like a lot of people, including myself, that have migrated recently or those who were born and were raised [in the U.S.] but that are culturally Puerto Rican are living between two cultures, two languages,” Acevedo-Yates said.
“entre horizontes” is organized into three parts, the first by artists who address social and political issues in their work with connections to Chicago. The second part includes painters who use various printmaking techniques, which have helped shape contemporary art in Puerto Rico with a social and political presence. The third section will show archival material from newspapers, posters and pins that tell an abbreviated story of the migration from Puerto Rico to Chicago.
The archival section will also feature documentation of activist-led efforts by Chicago’s Puerto Rican community.
Some of that includes work by Elizam Escobar, an artist and member of the Puerto Rican liberation group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional. In 1980, Escobar and 10 other members of the FALN were arrested in Evanston. They were found guilty of “seditious conspiracy” and received lengthy prison sentences.
In 1947, the U.S. government passed Law 53, La Ley de la Mordaza. It’s commonly known as the Gage Law, which made it illegal to fly the Puerto Rican flag and sing the island’s national anthem. The law was repealed in 1957, but prompted Puerto Rican nationalist movements like FALN to rise up across the country.
Escobar continued to paint while in prison, and he and 10 others were released in 1999 under an act of clemency by President Bill Clinton.
The exhibition includes work from Escobar, who died in 2021, as well as Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, who created a film installation documenting the site of former safe houses for the FALN.
“So there’s a lot of really interesting connections between activists here in Chicago and art history that I’m trying to bring together in this exhibition,” Acevedo-Yates said.
Chicago is home to more than 100,000 Puerto Ricans, who were first recruited by various companies in the late 1940s to work in foundries and steel mills and as domestic workers. Throughout that time, the Puerto Rican community has fought displacement and discrimination by starting their own supportive networks.
Still, national discussions on the diaspora tend to focus on cities and states like New York and Los Angeles, Acevedo-Yates said. She hopes this exhibition will change that.
“The Young Lords … people always talk about New York, and they were started here,” Acevedo-Yates said. “The Division Street Riots is the first kind of urban rebellion started by Puerto Ricans in this country … It’s a history of rebellion, of standing up for our community demanding equal rights.”
“entre horizontes” officially opens Saturday and will run through May 5. The MCA is hosting an opening-day celebration featuring a talk with Acevedo-Yates and Puerto Rican writer and activist José E. Lopez. Tickets are available here.
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