READING, PA.- The Reading Public Museum announced the first of its summer shows: Patrick McGrath Muņiz: Recolecciones / Recollections on view through August 24, 2025 in the Irvin and Lois E. Cohen Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. The exhibit brings together a body of work by an artist who was raised in Puerto Rico and currently lives and works in Texas. The paintings and drawings move between the personal and the collective, the analog and the digital, the past and the ever accelerating present. The show consists of fifteen paintings, including a group of four large altarpieces inspired by the four seasons—each fusing allegory, archetype, and lived experience—alongside eight ink drawings, intimate retablos, and detailed preparatory drawings for La Isla, the artist’s Puerto Rico–inspired Lenormand deck of cards.


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The bilingual title evokes two modes of remembering. In English, Recollections suggests memory—intimate, subjective, and elusive. In Spanish, Recolecciones implies a gathering or harvesting—deliberate, cyclical, and communal. These dual meanings reflect the artist’s ongoing exploration of memory not just as personal nostalgia, but as a process of cultural and symbolic reconstruction. Because McGrath Muņiz grew up in Puerto Rico and is now based in Texas, he measures his life in two halves: the first spent immersed in a more analog, nature-rooted world; the second shaped by digital life, political instability, and accelerating global crises. His work reflects this duality, drawing from Spanish Colonial iconography, Tarot symbolism, personal memories and contemporary culture.

Born from the remnants of a studio and home lost to Hurricane María, these paintings are more than commemorations of a vanished past. They are meditations on the fragility and resilience of memory, the persistence of myth, and the artist’s search for meaning amidst disruption. In a time when algorithms increasingly dictate cultural narratives and technological innovation often distances us from our environment, the artist reflects on how industrialization and screen-based life have severed our once sacred bond with the natural world and to ourselves—replacing direct sensory experience with simulation, and a grounded sense of place with disorientation.

In response, McGrath Muņiz turns toward symbolic language, archetypal storytelling, and a renewed sense of craftsmanship—constructing not only the painted images but also the intricate wooden frames that house them. Each composition is a visual excavation, a gathering of fragments—both autobiographical and universal assembled into retablos that echo the sacred while interrogating the current modern paradigm.

Ultimately, Recolecciones / Recollections invites viewers to contemplate the irreplaceable nature of human experience: shaped by loss, sustained by ritual, and revealed through the stories we choose to preserve and reimagine.

Muņiz holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Fine Arts of San Juan, Puerto Rico (2003), and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Savannah College of Art and Design (2006). His artworks reside in several public collections, including the National Hispanic Cultural Center and the Albuquerque Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico; The Nuevo Mexicano Heritage Arts Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum in Mesa, Arizona; The Reading Public Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania; and the New Orleans Museum of Art. His paintings also form part of numerous private collections across the United States, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean.