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S A V E T H E D A T E : Opening Reception, October 12, 2023

September 2023
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Travesías/Crossings - A Retrospective Exhibition of the work of Imna Arroyo

S A V E T H E D A T E : Opening Reception, October 12, 2023

The Museo de las Américas, San Juan, Puerto Rico will present the exhibit, Travesías / Crossings: The Work of Imna Arroyo, a mid-career retrospective exhibition presented jointly, as part of "Tiznando el país" by the Alliance of Museums of Puerto Rico, supported by the Anthony Mellon Foundation and the Flamboyán Foundation for the Arts. "Travesías / Crossings'' will integrate the offerings of the Museum for the closing of the UNESCO International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024) and the Polygraphic Triennial of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, which opens February 2024.

Travesías / Crossings is sponsored in part by the African Diaspora Institute of the Caribbean Cultural Center (CCCADI); the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Southwest Airlines, and the Surdna Foundation through a grant from the NALAC Fund for the Grant Program for the Arts and Artists Scholarship Program; the 2019-2020 Artistic Excellence Award from the Connecticut Office of the Arts (COA), which also receives funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency and Tiznando el País: Visualities and Representations an initiative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a collaborative project between the Alliance of Museums of Puerto Rico and the Multicultural Interdisciplinary Institute (INIM) of the Faculty of General Studies of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR).

The Museo de Las Americas is a vibrant cultural institution whose mission is to offer a synoptic vision of the history and culture: Museo de Las Américas · Map · Cuartel de Ballajá. 2nd Floor. Old San Juan, Puerto Rico 00902. Directions · (787) 724-5052.

Read more from Imna Arroyo

Puerto Rican artist devoted to exploring connections between the African continent and the Diaspora in an on-going endeavor to reclaim a lost and scattered heritage. Arroyo draws upon the imagery, symbolism and language of the Yoruba traditions of Africa to express a majestically complex and sophisticated worldview. In her multidisciplinary practice, she finds inspiration in the concept that art-making can be a ritualized form of healing.

"It is my intent to create Art that heals the deep-seated collective wounds of history, as well as to celebrate the vibrancy and relevance of a long denied ancestral legacy of self-expression", Imna Arroyo

Renowned scholar and Caribbean art and cultural critic, Yolanda Wood writes “… Imna Arroyo remains continually focused on those junctures where everything that is located outside the practices of hegemonic power, in the domains of the undervalued and subaltern, somehow meets. Settling within the space/time of these multiple references, she has inserted her own poetics based on life stories, autobiographical details, gender imprints, and the memories that inhabit them, all inscribed on the skin and in the reflections of the African subjects enslaved in times of modernity/coloniality and their descendants—which in fact we all are—and whose condition of existence the Barbadian writer George Lamming has identified as “a historical experience” in the Caribbean, yet one that certainly extends beyond the dominion of the plantations. From her migrant status, yet the bearer of a U.S. passport, Arroyo has succeeded in penetrating these silenced and hidden areas”.

Imna Arroyo

New London, CT

S A V E T H E D A T E : Opening Reception, October 12, 2023