Isla de
Las Palmas
Fifty photographs on fragile 45-gram newsprint, 64 pages, 11.5 × 15 in. Artist-published, Richmond, Virginia. Printed on newsprint, the pages change over time, the way the layered poster walls of Santurce do.
Edition of 25, made with the artist and bookmaker Rory Sparks: the newsprint book in a custom folio with a tipped-in print and a signed archival photograph, placing impermanence and preservation in the same object. It is my preferred realization.
A long-form photographic project about the lived condition of being, becoming and remaining Puerto Rican: not an identity to be found, but something made and remade through history, experience and memory.
Isla de Las Palmas gathers a body of work made in Puerto Rico during the years following my return to the island in midlife, after nearly a decade away following the death of my cousin Carlitos. The photographs, books, prints and exhibitions collected here come from a period in which I was learning, changing and being taught, through family, through history and through the lived experience of the island itself, while beginning to understand my own place within the longer story of the Puerto Rican diaspora. What began as return became a way of understanding my place within Puerto Rico and its ongoing historical condition.
Rather than a single project, Isla de Las Palmas became a field of related works shaped by that process: sequences, handmade books, exhibition installations, experimental prints and collaborative publications that emerged from the same sustained period of looking and making. Together they mark a distinct era in my work, one that closed around the end of 2023 and gave rise to newer Puerto Rico-based projects.
Fifty photographs, no captions. The book runs in loose chronological order, from the sea to the Taíno, through Spanish conquest, the 1898 US invasion, resistance and the colonial present, Hurricane María and onward. History comes through sequence and association rather than explanation. Every spread carries a first reading and a second one.
Isla de Las Palmas: Oro began in 2020 with the first gold-flecked prints. On metallic paper, the gold lifts the images toward something precious, even regal, while carrying the colonial history of extraction and the pursuit of gold that shaped Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Oro formed the portfolio for my 2025 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship.
The solo exhibition at El Cuadrado Gris, San Juan (December 11, 2020 to January 8, 2021) was planned as gold-flecked prints. When COVID restrictions kept those prints from being shown, I translated the photographs onto suspended gold-toned silk, interrupted by red images where histories of bloodshed surfaced.
In loving memory of Carlos.
