“Descifrando a Antonio Navia” [Deciphering Antonio Navia] has been on view since March 2026 at Puerto Rico’s Museum of Contemporary Art [Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC)] in Santurce, Puerto Rico. There is still time to catch this exhibition, which ends on July 26, 2026. Curated by Abdiel Segarra Ríos, this exhibition centers on the trajectory of the late Puerto Rican artist Antonio Navia (1945-2023) and features the collaboration of artists, academics, and graduate students who contributed to recovering “the documentary legacy and the conceptual integrity of his creative process.”
Description: What place does the territory we inhabit occupy in the universe? How do we perceive our relationship with that which is invisible to the eyes?
Antonio Navia (born in Bayamón, PR, 1945) studied at the Mayagüez campus of the University of Puerto Rico, the School of Fine Arts in San Juan, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1977, along with Luis Hernández Cruz, Paul Camacho, and Lope Max Díaz, he founded the FRENTE Group (Movimiento de Renovación Social del Arte) [Movement for Social Renewal of Art], a collective of artists aligned with the languages of abstraction who sought to revitalize the position of painting and contemporary art in Puerto Rico through the development of exhibitions, media outlets, and discussion forums attentive to international artistic and cultural practices.
Descifrando a Antonio Navia is a monographic exhibition that brings together several formally heterogeneous bodies of work, revealing an elaborate system of thought encoded in lines, angles, curves, colors, and materials that allows us to explore the meanings of the artist’s practice. The exhibition traces the materials Navia uses in the construction of his sculptures, as well as the rigor and complexity of his two-dimensional work, to investigate the references and resonances of his work with the present day.
Throughout his life, Antonio Navia demonstrated a genuine concern for considering artistic work beyond national paradigms of representation, creating his own universe of conditions for reflecting on a time and place that aspires to map the distances of the unconscious. The curatorial project closely examines his creative research processes and his interest in the organizational patterns of the universe, as well as his vision of the relationship between the physical world and paranormal phenomena, and the encounters between the cosmic and the earthly.
Descifrando a Antonio Navia gathers recent donations and works from the MAC’s permanent collection, as well as pieces held by the country’s leading cultural institutions. The selection of works on display proposes dialogues between records of site-specific installations, pieces from his first retrospective exhibition in the 1980s, previously unexhibited digital works, and pieces from his earliest production. The exhibition also features the collaboration of artists, academics, and graduate students who have contributed to the process of recovering the documentary legacy and the conceptual integrity of his creative process.
Today, following his passing in 2023, we acknowledge his trajectory by humbly approaching his legacy to celebrate the enigmas he explored through his work.
Descriptive essay translated by Ivette Romero. For the original essay (in Spanish), go to https://www.museomac.org/arte/exhibiciones/descifrando-a-antonio-navia