4th SAN JUAN POLY/GRAPHIC TRIENNIAL: Latin America and the Caribbean

24.10/2015 – 28.02/2016

Displaced Images / Images in Space

Curatorial team is comprised of chief curator Gerardo Mosquera (Cuba) and co-curators Vanessa Hernández Gracia (Puerto Rico) and Alexia Tala (Chile).

The 4th San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial: Latin America and the Caribbean is an international cultural event sponsored by the government of Puerto Rico and organized by the Fine Arts Program of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture (ICP). Created in 2004, the Triennial promotes experimentation in the graphic arts, stimulating the combination of traditional printmaking and contemporary practices within a different curatorial theme each year.

It has been said that the age of Gutenberg, the age of the text, is past, and that today we live in the age of the image. But a qualifier might be in order: We live in the age of the displaced image. The current ubiquity of images has led to their transformation in almost endless ways. Images are in constant transmutation as they shift among techniques, media, contexts, and cultures. They are appropriated and re-signified—recycled for new uses. They travel, they spread vertiginously around the world, in a visual tsunami that sweeps us up in its torrents.

The 4th Triennial will examine the formal, methodological and conceptual shifts and hybridizations of the graphic image across different fields, media, backgrounds, habits, and senses, as well as its projection into three-dimensional space. The works chosen for exhibition will manifest the expanded, instrumental, and decentralized nature of contemporary graphic arts—a decentralization that might lead us to speak of a post-graphic art. While the aim of the Triennial is to present the “poly”-faceted explosion in the graphic arts today, it will also include examples of traditional printmaking articulated in an expanded field. It will feature artists from Puerto Rico, Latin America, and the Caribbean, as well as Latino artists residing in the United States, including solo shows by Myrna Baéz, Fernando Bryce, and Carlos Garaicoa and important interventions in the public space.

This ambitious edition of the Triennial will include exhibitions, educational activities, events, and publications throughout Puerto Rico, expanding beyond the capital city of San Juan to include spaces on the periphery and in other municipalities.