The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (CENTRO) and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC) are collaborating to announce Glendalys Medina — Bronx-based conceptual interdisciplinary visual artist — as its new Artist-in-Residence for the academic year. In 2022, CENTRO’s Arts & Culture Department and the Museum through its MAC en el Barrio program, established a multi-annual collaboration to organize an artistic research residency whose creative results are informed by research in the CENTRO Library and Archives. MAC en el Barrio is an offsite program that the Museum has been carrying out since 2014 to strengthen cultural bridges and give visibility to the experience of Puerto Rican communities outside the archipelago.
Glendalys Medina’s project aims to make the Taíno pictographs more easily accessible to diasporic audiences and beyond, thereby facilitating a better understanding of the myths and culture of the Indigenous and how the symbols can begin to be used to tell new narratives of the Caribbean in digital times. The book will provide its audience with insight and a list of sources from CENTRO’s archive and other organizations and institutions in New York and Puerto Rico. The inspiration was born out of the artist’s research, which was done when looking for reference texts that held Taíno pictographs and their meanings and found that such a book does not exist. Since then, Medina has been gathering pictographs and references from various sources, interpreting their symbols and their potential meanings, and collecting them into a book which will be the final product of this residency.
Medina was born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Bronx. Medina received an MFA from Hunter College and has presented artwork internationally at such notable venues as PAMM, Artspace, Participant Inc., Performa 19, Artists Space, The Bronx Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Vigo, Spain, among others. Medina was a recipient of a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2020), a Jerome Hill Foundation Fellowship (2019), the Rome Prize in Visual Arts (2013), an NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Art (2012), and the Bronx Museum Artist in the Marketplace residency (2010), among others. Medina is currently a professor at SVA’s MFA Fine Arts program and lives and works in New York.
“We are honored to officially have Glendalys Medina as our Artist in Residence for the MAC en El Barrio partnership for this year. Glendalys is not only a great artist, but a great researcher who has been working at CENTRO’s Library & Archives for a while now, informing their practice with our rich collections. Medina’s residency also affirms and expands our collaboration with Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico. Through this partnership, we seek to promote our common goal to help promote the presence of Diasporican artists to their ancestral land: Puerto Rico,” Ángel Antonio Ruiz Laboy, the Deputy Director & Associate Director of Arts and Culture for CENTRO, said.
“We are extremely proud to continue this collaborative effort between institutions dedicated to the research and analysis of Puerto Rican culture. Efforts like this allow us to rewrite the cultural and geographic borders that separate our diasporas from the archipelago and vice versa. MAC and CENTRO share an integrative vision of cultural work that seeks to articulate spaces of encounter to collectively weave conversations and common practices between artists and communities,” Marianne Ramírez Aponte, the Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, said.
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About CENTRO
Founded in 1973 by a coalition of students, faculty, and activists, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (CENTRO) is the largest and oldest university-based research institute, library, and archive dedicated to the Puerto Rican experience in the United States. It provides support to students, scholars, artists, and members of the community at large across and beyond New York. Additionally, it produces original research, films, books, and educational tools and is the home of Centro Journal—the premiere academic journal of Puerto Rican Studies. CENTRO’s aim is to create actionable and accessible scholarship to strengthen, broaden, and reimagine the field of Puerto Rican studies.
CENTRO is a treasured institution where researchers, academics, teachers, students, genealogists, filmmakers, and the community at large find primary (historical documents) and secondary sources about the history and culture of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. Most facilities, resources, and programs in the City University of New York (CUNY) system are limited to affiliates of the University. In the case of CENTRO’s Library and Archives, non-circulating materials and resources are open and available for use by the public at large, irrespective of CUNY affiliation. CENTRO’s programs and services are similarly open to the broader
community in New York City and beyond. Since its inception, the institute has served as a site of encounter and collaboration between university affiliates and community members.
About Hunter College
Located in the heart of Manhattan, Hunter is the largest college in the City University of New York (CUNY) system. Founded in 1870, it is also one of the oldest public colleges in the country and famous for a student body that is as diverse as the city itself. Most Hunter students are the first in their families to attend college and many go on to top professional and graduate programs, winning Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships, Mellon fellowships, National Institutes of Health grants, and other competitive honors. More than 23,000 students currently attend Hunter, pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in more than 170 areas of study. The 1,700 full- and part-time members of Hunter’s faculty are unparalleled. They receive prestigious national grants, contribute to the world’s leading academic journals, and play major roles in cutting-edge research. They are fighting cancer, formulating public policy, expanding our culture, enhancing technology, and more.
About MAC
Founded in 1984 in Santurce, the MAC was born from the will of Puerto Rican artists and other members of the cultural community to create an alternative model to exhibit and promote contemporary art and its themes. The MAC fosters an open vision of contemporary art from the multiple perspectives that converge in Puerto Rico: diasporic, Latin, Caribbean-regional, and Latin American cultures within a global context. It is a space for production and creation, as well as research and exhibition that encourages a constant dialogue between artists and the public, between past and present, between art practice, and theory and criticism.
About MAC en el Barrio
MAC en el Barrio was founded in 2014 as a program of artistic commissions that link the museum’s cultural endeavors with the social work of advocacy and activism of community leaders and grassroots projects in different municipalities of the Puerto Rican archipelago. During its 10-year trajectory, the program has commissioned more than 85 projects in addition to several workshop initiatives for audiences of all ages, including specific efforts focused on emergency management in communities vulnerable to the climate crisis.