Traveling is a muscle that benefits from exercise.
I’m often lucky to rely on my friend Chris Pratt (not that one) for joyful travel. The expeditions he’s planned over the many years I’ve known him—Europe, Southeast Asia, Ukraine, South Africa, a hike across Japan—were all incredible adventures with many moving parts, dense and memorable.
This trip to Puerto Rico is much smaller in scale than those experiences—a litmus test to navigate a world with COVID, check out an unknown place and honestly? Just chill the eff out.
My travel muscles weren’t so atrophied to know that a rainy day is a good for museums—so that’s what we did on day 3 in San Juan.
The Puerto Rico Contemporary Art Museum is small (3-4 galleries at any given point in time), but it scratches the itch and involved experiencing different parts of the city.
Felt good to exercise new perspectives.
Cüirtopia
The photos above are details from the Cüirtopia exhibition by Regner Ramos that filled one of the galleries. It was a mixed media experience that told the story of aliens and queer spaces in the Caribbean. Films combined with music, graphic design and these architectural pieces. All together? A really impressive and expansive thing. (That also has a companion website.)
The Museum of the Old Colony
Images below are part of Pablo Delano’s The Museum of the Old Colony, a collection of photographs with original captions that illustrate the colonial oppression imposed by the U.S. on Puerto Rican life. A powerful slice of a much larger collection that is spread out among many venues around the world.
(Re)conocer El Futuro
(Re)Know the Future – A Selection of Works of the Permanent Collection. This last gallery includes artists from Ukraine, Puerto Rico and South America.
Around the neighborhood
