UNRULY SUBJECTS
ABOUT THE INSTALLATION
SOFÍA GALLISÁ MURIENTE
BORN 1986, SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO; ACTIVE SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO
NATALIA LASSALLE-MORILLO
BORN 1991, BAYAMÓN, PUERTO RICO; ACTIVE SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO
CARLOS J. SOTO
BORN 1980, NEW YORK, NEW YORK; ACTIVE BRONX, NEW YORK
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s Unruly Subjects examines the Smithsonian Institution as a home for Puerto Rican cultural heritage. In 2022, the artists participated in the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, which gave them access to the Teodoro Vidal Collection of Puerto Rican History at the National Museum of American History, and to Taíno objects from Puerto Rico collected by Jesse Walter Fewkes at the National Museum of Natural History. Fewkes was a Smithsonian anthropologist sent to Puerto Rico as the Spanish-American War (1898) ended to collect Indigenous objects from the United States’s new “territory.” Vidal was a Puerto Rican government official and self-taught historian whose gift of more than 3,000 objects from the Island constituted one of the largest donations in Smithsonian history.
Time spent with these collections fueled the artists’ interest in the materials and design strategies used to protect and house Smithsonian objects, in contrast with the original homes from which these objects were taken, illustrating the difference between institutional space and the living histories preserved in Puerto Rico by countless individuals.
In response, Gallisá Muriente and Lassalle-Morillo commissioned contemporary Puerto Rican artists working with clay, cotton, and natural pigments—materials used by inhabitants of the archipelago for centuries—to create works inspired by the collection. Conceived with theater designer Carlos J. Soto, Unruly Subjects brings to life the many actors involved in amassing and preserving the material culture of Puerto Rico. Juxtaposing reimagined spaces of collections care with a series of videos and reimagined objects, Lassalle-Morillo and Gallisá Muriente endeavor to connect the Smithsonian collection objects and their origins in Puerto Rico, while also examining the collecting histories of Fewkes and Vidal.
visual description
Unruly Subjects is installed in a large, long gallery with the ground covered in a silver– gray colored rubber flooring with raised circles for traction. Two large rectangular glass display cases installed in a row take up the majority of the center of the gallery and nearly reach the ceiling. In between the two glass cases is a blueish-gray aluminum flat file cabinet elevated on a short platform. It has four shallow drawers that have been pulled out and filled with samples of earth in three different shades of brown. The bottom shelf has been sorted by color in trays, light brown on the left, red brown in the middle, and a medium brown on the right. In the second to bottom drawer is a framed print propped up vertically of a Bauhinia monandra seed pod. The long brown seed pod and a handful of seeds are also displayed on top of the filing cabinet in a small glass case. The tall glass cases on either side of the filing cabinet are split into sections, each holding a variety of objects that speak to Puerto Rican cultural patrimony.
Beginning with the glass case to the left of the filing cabinet, closest to the information kiosk, the first of four sections holds a large white cone structure covered with fishing net. Next is an assortment of natural fibers, natural pigments and swatches of dye tests, followed by shelves displaying orange-brown hollowed cones labeled as “acrostic objects made from soils harvested in Puerto Rico”. The last section, next to the earth-filled file cabinet, contains a display of natural pigments with solid pieces of earth, earth ground into power, tools, and small papers with gradients of color tests. Continuing to the other side of the filing cabinet, the first section of five in the second glass display case holds a carnival mask propped up by protective foam pieces and archival packing material. The mask is primarily a reddish color textured with multi-colored brush strokes. The mask is a vejigante folklore demon with a long dragon-like snout, pointed teeth and many long– pointed horns. The following section shows a display of clay pots and strips of clay fired in a variety of temperatures in a range of browns organized by shade. In the middle section there is a large white pillow with decorative embroidery labeled Teodoro’s pillowcase. Continuing to the right is a display of small imperfect spheres of clay alongside larger ceramic shards from a water filter. The final section is another vejigante carnival mask. This one is larger, painted black with stippled multi-colored dots, with countless horns growing out of other horns, and small red mouths growing around the largest long fanged mouth. Above each mouth are glittery silver sphere eyes.
All along the walls surrounding the glass cases are several videos on monitors across the gallery, objects behind glass, paintings, and displays of photographs and paper ephemera are shown. The largest video plays on the wall behind the earth-filled flat file cabinet showing scenes of people making their way through dense green vegetation. A projected video across from the kiosk shows a scene of artifacts lining the drawers of a flat file cabinet that seem to be a collection of rocks and tools. In front of the video projection is an image on a long lightbox display of an image depicting a row of sculpted stones. Many are abstract but several have anthropomorphic features. Nearby at the end of the gallery by the kiosk is another object. On a pedestal behind glass is a painted wooden figure of the Italian nun Saint Rita holding a cross and dressed in black nun attire. At the other end of the gallery, another projected video shows small objects in numbered plastic bags pulled out of an archive and close ups of a carnival mask. In front of the video projection are four white sacks filled with earth and sorted by color. One monitor shows a montage of scanned slides from the Teodoro Vidal Collection near a pair of gold and diamond earrings behind glass on a small pillow in a small, recessed square in the wall. Another monitor shows a diary being read out loud through a magnifying glass next to a lightbox display of documents such as 1903 letters from the Bureau of American Ethnology, old photographs of landscapes and drawings carved into a boulder, and The San Juan Star newspaper with the headline “Taino relic thieves demand ‘repatriation’”. Two watercolors hang near the filing cabinet by the entrance in the center of the gallery that leads to the main hallway of the 2nd floor. One is made up of small individual square paintings that together become a green map connecting names, places, water, land, people, animals, objects and artifacts. The other painting shows two scenes stacked vertically. On top, the shadows of three people look out from a river-like area of dark blue onto rusty brown earth-colored organic shapes overlapping and flowing into each other. The bottom scene shows an arm reaching down touching the same lush terrain of browns with their pointer finger.
Acknowledgements
Artist collaborators include Amara Abdal Figueroa, Karla Claudio, Carola Cintrón Moscoso, Beatriz Lizardi, Leila Mattina, and Rosaura Rodríguez.
Videos filmed and edited by Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo. Assistant Editor Laura Sofía Pérez. Sound Design Juan Antonio Arroyo. Sound Recordist Victor Torres González. Additional camera work by Xhosa Fray-Chinn. Color correction Oswaldo Colón Ortíz.
Special thanks to Paulina Ascencio, Joshua Bell, Casa Fantasmes, Antonio Curet, Rosa Ficek, Mario Gracia, Dani Gracia, Nayarit Gracia Rodríguez, Reibo Gracia Vanasse, Amanda Guzman, Jake Homiak, Nancy Kenet Vickery, Gina Malley Campos, Carlos Martínez Palmer, Emily Orr, Jomary Ortega, Abdiel Ortíz Carrasquillo, Katherine Ott, Marta Pérez García, Roberto Pérez Reyes, Julio Quiros, Ramón Rivera Servera, Reniel Rodríguez, Nina Lucía Rodríguez, Gisela Rosario Ramos, Soraya Serra, Fernando Schnitzer Krasinsky, Elena Vanasse Torres, Stephen Velázquez, Carlos Vélez Mercado, Cynthia Vidaurri, Ranald Woodaman, and Ricardo Zeno.
