AUSTIN, TX.- The Puerto Rican Arts Initiative (PRAI), a curatorial platform created to support and promote performance and ephemeral arts, will move into its third phase as the program continues to invest in Puerto Rican contemporary art practices during the next three years.

In 2024, the project secured $1.2 million in additional funding from the Mellon Foundation for its third phase that will allow the initiative to continue supporting local artists and curators advancing projects that consider the environment, public space and community infrastructures. In this next phase, the project will support micro-residencies, curatorial projects, workshops and exhibitions focused on performance and ephemeral arts in Puerto Rico.

Led by principal investigator and College of Fine Arts Dean Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative already has supported more than 50 Puerto Rican artists who have significantly helped circulate and expand the reach and impact of an increasing number of performance art practitioners across Puerto Rico and the U.S.

“I am delighted for the support from the Mellon Foundation and our individual and institutional partners across Puerto Rico, Austin and Chicago,” Rivera-Servera said. “This new round of investments and collaborations allows us to continue amplifying the work of Puerto Rican artists whose practices have proven crucial to sustaining critical public spaces and avenues for imagining collective futures.”

Artist Residencies

The month-long micro-residencies will launch open calls twice a year and support artists developing new works and assign each artist a mentor and production assistant. The artists selected for the first micro-residency cohort include

• Pelé Sánchez Tormes with mentor nibia pastrana santiago
• Kairiana Núñez Santaliz with mentor Rojo Robles Mejías
• Elizabeth Robles with mentor Mari Martín
• Miguel A. González Cordero with mentor Teresa Hernández

The project’s first collaborative residency was granted to interdisciplinary artists and vogue dancers Edrimael Delgado-Reyes of Puerto Rico and Benji Hart of Chicago. Their work explores experimentations with the histories and techniques of vogueing as tools for individual transformation, collective justice and a way to explore queer and Afro-diasporic experience. Their performances will be showcased in residencies in Austin and Chicago as part of this investment.

Workshops and Retreats

The project will also bring in a series of internationally renowned artists to conduct workshops with local artists and curators and participate in focused retreat experiences over the next three years. Workshops this year include the following:

• “La Escuelita Fenomenal de Romperforma,” a workshop series led by experimental choreographers Viveca Vázquez and Merián Soto, will invite guest dancemakers Arthur Aviles (New York), Marion Ramírez (Ohio) and Eiko Otake (Japan/New York) to conduct a series of dance workshops, talks and presentations at universities and communities in Puerto Rico.

• Puerto Rican movement artists Karen Langevin and theater and performance artist Pelé Sánchez-Tormes will organize a one-week movement workshop, “Merging a Possible with the Impossible,” with Austin-based choreographer and performer Deborah Hay in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico.

• Caribbean artist and curator Helen Ceballos, in collaboration with writer Mayra Santos Febres and visual artist Jose Arturo Ballester, will coordinate “El Cruce,” an artistic residency and workshop in Finca Limaní. El Cruce will bring together Puerto Rican and Caribbean artists to exchange their creative practices, sensibilities and knowledges in dialogue with the rural environment in Adjuntas.

• Performance artist Mickey Negrón will lead his one-week “Me ocupo” workshop in Mayagüez through a collaboration with the alternative cultural space Taller Libertá.

• Teatro en Movimiento por el Viejo San Juan, a youth performance training platform led by theatre artist Maritza Pérez, will offer summer workshops for youth in 2025 and 2026 with the participation of performance artists from the PRAI roster.

The Puerto Rican Arts Initiative’s first retreat will be hosted by visual artists Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle Morillo at Camp Tabonuco in Jayuya and will support femme and queer experimental visual artists from the Caribbean and its diasporas. The gathering, conceptualized around themes of territory, corporality, coloniality, memory and care, will also offer a public program for broader communities to experience the work of the artists gathered.

Curatorial Projects

And finally, the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative will support numerous curatorial projects focused on the presentation and exhibition of performance and ephemeral arts in Puerto Rico through its PRAI@ subvention program. The first round of commissions and group gatherings include:

• “Oasis: fractal psicotrópico,” curated by emergent dancer and performance choreographer x., is a dance, music and installation-performance marathon inspired by the archipelago’s political, economic and environmental calamities. This one-day event in October was developed in collaboration with the musician LuisFra Colón “El Necio” and will take the form of a mythological oasis that evokes Guabancex, a deity of chaos in Taíno culture, to explore the question, “How do we sustain ourselves through the storm?”

• “How much is the change? A cabaret performance in times of erosion and emotion” is a community-based dark-cabaret proposed by Puerto Rican artist, curator and community cultural manager Puchi Platón that showcases the work of mature female artists who have been experiencing profound changes and transformations in their artistic practices and personal lives. “How much is the change?” includes artists Maritza Martínez, Iliana García, Magali Carrasquillo, Cristina Sesto, Yolanda Velázquez and Lilianna Rivera, who are longtime members and collaborators of Taller Comunidad la Goyco in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

• “Código de Desorden Público Artículo 2: Bachata, Ciencia Ficción y Cabronería,” curated by filmmaker and curator Ryan Pérez Hicks, is a large-scale performance event that will bring together local artists from Puerto Rico and invited artists from Latin America and the Caribbean to perform in Paseo de Diego, Río Piedras. “Código de Desorden Público” explores Puerto Rican and Dominican solidarity against the dehumanizing violence of rapid development and transformation of the urban environment.

• “Ojo avizor” is a performance program featuring the Puerto Rican dance group La Trinchera, a dance and performance collective founded in 2015 by independent Puerto Rican artists Beatriz Irizarry, Cristina Lugo and Marili “Mimi” Pizarro. The project is curated by Puerto Rican visual artist and curator José López Serra in a collaborative partnership between his project space Hidrante and the artist residency space San Juan 721. The artists will develop a series of site-specific events in different parking lots and transform them into spaces for movement research and performance experimentation.

Rivera-Servera launched the initiative in 2017 with his collaborators and co-principal investigators José Alvarez-Colón and Arnaldo Rodriguez-Bagué, both doctoral candidates in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. The initial residency program, which included the performance duo Las Nietas de Nonó, brought artists into a collaborative microresidency to explore the issue of the debt crisis in Puerto Rico. With the passing of hurricanes Maria and Irma, the initiative pivoted to help artists rebuild and develop new work after the calamity. In the immediate aftermath of the storms, Rivera-Servera worked to raise funds to support artists in Puerto Rico, securing support from Northwestern University, the Mellon Foundation, individual donations and a dozen university partners across the United States. The Puerto Rican Arts Initiative created a platform to commission a group of Puerto Rican artists and paired them with mentors during a period of two years to create new work and circulate to universities, performance venues and community partner organizations where they could deliver workshops and translate their work to broader communities while building new professional connections and opportunities.

In 2020, the project kicked off its second phase and supported a cohort of 10 artists who anchored another robust three years of commissions, workshops and performances that activated more than 100 creative practitioners and service providers in support of the artistic and economic activity generated by the 10 artist-run curatorial platforms. The second phase of the project concluded with the publication of a series of artist books documenting the work of the artists and available worldwide in digital form.