The Institute of Puerto Rican Culture (ICP) was created in 1955 for the purpose of rescuing, preserving, and making better known the island’s historical and cultural heritage. From the beginning, the ICP had a clear vision of Puerto Rican culture. That vision was stated in the following way by historian and anthropologist Ricardo Alegría (San Juan, 1921–2011), the Institute’s founder and its director for eighteen years: The concept of national culture includes the simplest and most popular folkloric expressions as well as its most refined, sophisticated, cultured manifestations. Among the many policies implemented by Alegría, one of the first was the acquisition of artworks by Puerto Rican artists. Today, the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture’s collection is unquestionably the island’s most important in terms of both number and quality of works. It holds the most significant representatives of the island’s plastic arts of every time and period, with works essential to tracing the historical line of our island’s culture.
The exhibit Re-encuentros. Masterpieces from the Collection of the ICP allows us to have a second look at a group of iconic works essential to Puerto Rico’s collective imaginary. These works, the historical legacy of our people, offer us the opportunity to rediscover and reassess the molding, shaping creative will that inspired the masters of our plastic arts.
The exhibit is divided into five thematic groupings representing the various imaginaries that constitute what we call puertorriqueñidad—Puerto Rican-ness, what it means to us to be Puerto Rican, what we feel and “see” when we define ourselves. We begin with the discovery of our geographic and human surroundings, combined with an exaltation of the products of the earth at the end of the nineteenth century. This is followed by the construction of the city, documented in art beginning in the 1940s, and the emotional attachment to our traditions and history as inculcated by the artists of the “Generation of the Fifties.” We conclude with the European artistic legacy in the religious painting of José Campeche y Jordán.
The immense labor of constructing the gaze that the island’s artists have engaged in down through the centuries will allow us to have a long, loving second look at our past, and at ourselves, and thus enable us to continue to imagine, create, and shape our own culture.