“no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria”—a landmark exhibition centering on artists’ perspectives on the urgent issues impacting Puerto Rico today—opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art on November 23, 2022 and runs through April 23, 2023. [Member previews available November 17–21.]

Five years after Hurricane Maria—a Category 4 storm that hit the island in 2017—an intergenerational group of Puerto Rican artists respond to the devastation and transformation the storm brought with it.

Description: no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria is organized to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria—a high-end Category 4 storm that hit Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. The exhibition explores how artists have responded to the transformative years since that event by bringing together more than fifty artworks made over the last five years by an intergenerational group of more than fifteen artists from Puerto Rico and the diaspora. no existe un mundo poshuracán—a verse borrowed from Puerto Rican poet Raquel Salas Rivera—is the first scholarly exhibition focused on Puerto Rican art to be organized by a large U.S. museum in nearly half a century.

While Hurricane Maria serves as a focal point, the exhibition is defined by a larger context in which the aftermath of the storm was further exacerbated by the chain of events that preceded and followed this (un)natural disaster, including the austerity measures implemented by the PROMESA law (also known as La Junta); the deaths of 4,645 Puerto Ricans as a consequence of the Hurricane; the protests during the Verano del 19 (Summer of 2019) that led to the ouster of governor Ricardo Rosselló; the string of earthquakes; the COVID-19 pandemic; and much more. As a response to these constant existential threats, the exhibition offers a platform to the artists and the ways they have forged paths through the wake of these legacies.

This exhibition is organized by Marcela Guerrero, Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator, with Angelica Arbelaez, Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow, and Sofía Silva, former Curatorial & Education Fellow in U.S. Latinx Art.

For more information, see https://whitney.org/exhibitions/no-existe