The New Wave: Five Puerto Rican Artists Redefining Caribbean Contemporary Art
By Carmen Luisa Rivera | December 2024 | 12 min read
In the wake of Hurricane María, Puerto Rican art transformed. What emerged wasn’t simply disaster art—it was something more complex: a reckoning with colonialism, a meditation on resilience, and a bold reimagining of what Caribbean contemporary art could be. A new generation of artists, many splitting time between the island and diaspora communities in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere, is producing work that demands attention on the global stage.
These five artists represent the vanguard of this movement. Their work spans installation, painting, digital media, and performance, but shares a common thread: an unflinching engagement with Puerto Rican identity in all its complexity.
1. Sofía Gallisá Muriente
Based in San Juan, Gallisá Muriente works at the intersection of archival research, video installation, and collaborative practice. Her project Celaje (2019) compiled footage from Puerto Rican news archives, creating a meditation on how television shaped collective memory during decades of political and cultural change.
“I’m interested in the gap between what is documented and what is remembered,” Gallisá Muriente explains. “Puerto Rico has a complicated relationship with its own archives—so much has been lost, neglected, or controlled by outside institutions.”
Her recent work A través del huracán examines the visual language used to represent hurricanes in Puerto Rican media over decades, questioning how repeated imagery of destruction shapes—and limits—how the island sees itself.
Where to see her work: Gallisá Muriente’s installations have been featured at the Whitney Biennial, the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, and Beta-Local in San Juan.
2. Christopher Rivera
Rivera’s paintings combine Puerto Rican folk imagery with contemporary abstraction, creating works that feel simultaneously ancestral and urgent. His series Los Santos Modernos reimagines the tradition of saint paintings—once ubiquitous in Puerto Rican homes—as portraits of contemporary figures: activists, drag performers, jíbaros working in coffee fields.
“I grew up with those saint images everywhere,” Rivera says. “They were devotional, but also decorative—this interesting mix of the sacred and the everyday. I wanted to bring that same energy to figures from our current moment.”
Working from his studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Rivera maintains close ties to the island, returning regularly for residencies and collaborations. His canvases, often monumental in scale, use the gold leaf and rich pigments of religious painting while incorporating elements of street art and graffiti.
Where to see his work: Rivera has shown at El Museo del Barrio, the Bronx Museum, and Embajada gallery in San Juan.
3. Gabriella Torres-Ferrer
Torres-Ferrer’s practice centers on performance and social sculpture. Her ongoing project Borikén Wellness Center takes the form of pop-up healing spaces—part art installation, part community gathering—that offer free services like haircuts, massage, and collective cooking to Puerto Rican communities affected by displacement.
“After María, so many people left,” Torres-Ferrer observes. “There’s this scattered diaspora, all these people carrying trauma and grief. I wanted to create spaces where we could be together, take care of each other, without it being about spectacle or pity.”
Born in Bayamón and now based in Philadelphia, Torres-Ferrer trained as a sculptor but found that objects felt insufficient for what she wanted to communicate. Her shift to performance and social practice emerged from necessity.
Where to see her work: Torres-Ferrer’s Borikén Wellness Center has appeared at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, and various community spaces throughout the Northeast.
4. Radamés “Juni” Figueroa
Figueroa is a provocateur. His installations and sculptures transform everyday objects—coolers, plastic chairs, car parts—into monuments that critique consumer culture, colonial economics, and the aesthetics of poverty. His piece La Perla Deluxe (2020) recreated a fragment of the famous San Juan neighborhood using luxury materials, forcing viewers to confront their own romanticization of working-class Puerto Rican spaces.
“People love the idea of La Perla—the colors, the ocean view, the supposed authenticity,” Figueroa says. “But they don’t want to engage with the reality of it: the poverty, the neglect, the violence of gentrification happening right now.”
Working primarily in Santurce, Figueroa is a central figure in the neighborhood’s art scene, known for collaborative projects and his commitment to keeping art accessible to local communities.
Where to see his work: Figueroa has shown at Documenta, the Liverpool Biennial, and maintains an experimental space in Santurce.
5. Monica Félix
Félix works in digital media and net art, exploring how Puerto Ricans represent themselves online and how technology mediates diaspora identity. Her project 404 Island Not Found (2022) created a virtual Puerto Rico—accessible only through a specific URL—populated with glitched images, corrupted files, and fragments of oral histories.
“The internet was supposed to collapse distance,” Félix explains. “For diaspora communities, it did—sort of. But it also created new kinds of disconnection, new gaps between how we experience the island and how we imagine it.”
Raised in Orlando in a Puerto Rican enclave community, Félix returned to the island for graduate study and now moves between San Juan and New York. Her work resonates particularly with younger Puerto Ricans who have complex relationships to the island, often knowing it primarily through family stories and social media.
Where to see her work: Félix’s digital projects are accessible online. She has also shown at the New Museum, the ICA Miami, and Espacio 1414 in Santurce.
A Movement, Not a Moment
What connects these five artists—beyond shared heritage and overlapping social circles—is a refusal to let Puerto Rican art be defined by outsiders. They reject both the folkloric expectations of collectors seeking “authentic” Caribbean work and the disaster narratives that have dominated coverage of the island since 2017.
“We’re not post-María artists,” Rivera says. “We’re Puerto Rican artists. The hurricane is part of our context, but so is everything else: the debt crisis, the diaspora, the music, the food, our ancestors, our futures.”
This insistence on complexity—on the right to make work that is difficult, personal, political, playful, angry, and joyful—marks the new wave. Puerto Rican contemporary art is not waiting for permission or validation from mainland institutions. It is building its own infrastructure, creating its own conversations, and speaking to audiences that understand the work in ways New York critics never will.
The five artists profiled here are just the beginning. Across the island and the diaspora, a generation is at work, making art that will define Puerto Rican visual culture for decades to come.
Carmen Luisa Rivera is a San Juan-based art critic and curator. She writes regularly for El Cuarto del Quenepón and Art in America.