Opening Night of Diasporic Collage: Puerto Rico & the Survival of a People

Join CENTRO on the opening night of Diasporic Collage: Puerto Rico and the Survival of a People, on view at the CENTRO Gallery in El Barrio from March 13th, 2025 to September, 2025. This exhibition honors Puerto Rican identities in the archipelago and its diasporas. The Puerto Rican diaspora can be understood as a collage of overlapping histories of colonialism, resistance, and survival, and Diasporic Collage engages with collage as both practice and metaphor. Countering the concept of a melting pot, which emphasizes assimilation and loss of culture, the idea of a collaged community allows for the celebration of roots and relations. This exhibition also considers the close relationship between photography and collage, both notable 20th-century art forms. It takes the first major documentary initiative on the Puerto Rican diaspora as a point of departure to examine the enduring legacy of survival and migration. The artists featured in this exhibition consider the Puerto Rican diaspora in a fluid and expansive way. While several focus on the diaspora in the traditional sense—Puerto Ricans who migrate to the United States—many honor the different diasporas that intersect with the archipelago of Puerto Rico, documenting their communities with care and showing us a collage of Puerto Rican and Caribbean experiences.

Photo Credit: Puerto Rican contingent of the Hispanic Festival, San Francisco Bomba Collective, San Francisco, CA, 1981

This event has been made possible through the Mellon funded Rooted + Relational Research Initiative.