EXHIBITIONS at El Schomburg
Art rooted in memory, diaspora, and community transformation.
El Schomburg | Espacio de Arte Interdisciplinario curates exhibitions that uplift Puerto Rican, Afro-diasporic, and community-centered artistic practices. Our shows explore memory, resistance, environmental trauma, migration, Black and Brown embodiment, and the creative resilience of the Puerto Rican diaspora.We present exhibitions by emerging, mid-career, and established artists working across performance, installation, photography, text, and interdisciplinary practice.
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UPCOMING EXHIBITION
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expand blur collapse
Nayda Collazo-Lloréns
March 6 – April 30, 2026
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expand blur collapse is a new video installation by Nayda Collazo-Lloréns that explores the interconnected terrains of memory, language, and place. Drawing from research at the Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College, alongside personal and found sources, the work gathers and remaps selected words and traces that slip between legibility and abstraction.
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Moving between archive and imagination, the installation becomes a personal and political exploration of loss, disjointed histories, and the pervasive sense of collapse that frames our present. Rather than stabilizing meaning, the work embraces fragmentation—allowing language to blur, expand, and reorganize itself into new constellations of sense and sensation.
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Through layered images, shifting texts, and temporal disjunctions, expand blur collapse invites viewers to sit with uncertainty and partial knowledge: to consider how memory is constructed, how histories are interrupted, and how the archive can function not only as a site of preservation, but also as a space of erasure, speculation, and reinvention.
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About the Artist
Nayda Collazo-Lloréns (born in San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice incorporates multiple mediums and strategies to explore concepts of navigation and dislocation. She earned an MFA from New York University and a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Beta-Local’s El Serrucho, among others, and was a Visiting Fellow at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. She was part of the 2024–25 Rooted + Relational Fellows cohort at The Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College.
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Her work has been exhibited at El Museo del Barrio (New York), The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), Museum of Latin American Art (Long Beach), The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum (Miami), Bass Museum of Art (Miami Beach), Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, Museo Universitario del Chopo (Mexico City), and The Dowse Art Museum (New Zealand), among others. Her work was included in the 2025 exhibition Vaivén: 21st-Century Art of Puerto Rico and Its Diaspora at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota, with a bilingual catalog distributed by University of Minnesota Press.
Her work has also been featured in Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (Duke University Press), A to Z of Caribbean Art, and The Dark Would: Language Art Anthology, and reviewed in The New York Times, Art News, ArtNet, Hyperallergic, BOMB, and Newcity. She is currently based in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
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Learn more about Nayda Collazo-Llórens trajectory here.
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Past Exhibitions
RESIDUAL | Irse sin dejar rastro | To Leave Without a Trace
Co-curators: Brenda Torres-Figueroa & Alejandra Rosa
September 26- November 16, 2025
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Irse sin dejar rastro, ser materia, pero etérea, pintarse de noche, de sombra tibia, de silencio, de sin registro, de sin huella, de abre camino, de murmullo de orilla…
(To leave without a trace. To be matter, yet ethereal. To cloak oneself in night, in warm shadow, in silence. To be unrecorded, unmarked. To carve a path, to be the whisper along the shore…)
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Residual: Irse sin dejar rastro brings together a cohort of Afro-Caribbean performance artists whose practices navigate the intersections of memory, spatiality, and identity. Central to the exhibition is the notion of the body as both archive and cartography—an entity that continually negotiates visibility and erasure.
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The artists featured in this exhibition engage in performative acts that resist dominant narratives and confront archival absences, asserting presence in spaces historically structured to negate it. Whether through live interventions, recorded installations, or public conversations, each work maps the intimate terrain of existence under colonial, racial, and gendered violence. In this way, the project explores how performance can articulate the paradox of presence within invisibility.
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Residual: Irse sin dejar rastro invites audiences into a space of deep listening and witnessing. It asks: What does it mean to disappear without absence? How can the unseen be rendered legible through sound, shadow, and gesture? And what histories—silenced or submerged—emerge when the shore is understood not as a boundary, but as a transgeographical beginning?
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Through its focus on land, memory, and Black embodiment in Puerto Rico and its diasporas, the exhibition creates a transhistorical dialogue—one that resonates with both local urgencies and global conversations about race, migration, survival, and endurance. By centering artists who challenge visibility on their own terms, the project resists traditional archival logics and reclaims space for fugitive, intimate, and collective modes of knowing.
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This exhibition was possible with the generous support of: PRAI, Tiznando el Pais (Mellon Foundation), FLOURISH, the Puerto Rican Cultural Center.
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Rafa Miranda Mattei
August 15 -September 20, 2025
El Schomburg & Grabaciones para un país de memoria corta: Tracking Issues
Text adapted from Susan Gescheidle
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El Schomburg opened in October 2023 in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. Founded by Brenda Torres-Figueroa—artist, educator, and curator—the space serves as a contemporary art center and cultural hub rooted in Chicago’s Puerto Rican community and inspired by the legacy of Afro–Puerto Rican historian Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Located in a storefront with a black brick façade, the site features a mural of Arturo Schomburg and a Puerto Rican flag above the entrance, signaling its commitment to history, culture, and diasporic presence.
Grabaciones para un país de memoria corta: Tracking Issues, an exhibition curated by Alexis Figueroa of Trailer Park Projects, presents the work of Puerto Rican artist Rafael J. Miranda Mattei, currently based in the United States. The exhibition marks more than two decades of artistic and personal collaboration between Figueroa and Miranda Mattei. Notably, Miranda Mattei’s first visit to Chicago in 2013 was for a Trailer Park Projects exhibition organized in Figueroa’s truck—an early gesture that reflects the project’s experimental and community-centered ethos. Here, Figueroa reflects on how Miranda Mattei’s artistic perspective has evolved over time, considering the impact of distance, migration, and new environments on his practice.
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Miranda Mattei is a mid-career artist and educator whose work has been exhibited in San Juan, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Madrid, and Buenos Aires. Now living in New Jersey, he speaks openly about the emotional and cultural weight of being separated from friends and family in Puerto Rico—an experience that continues to shape his work and deepen his engagement with questions of identity and political representation. His presentation at El Schomburg is rooted in a desire to connect with Chicago’s Puerto Rican community and aligns closely with the space’s focus on Puerto Rican and diasporic art.
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Grabaciones para un país de memoria corta (Recordings for a Country with a Short Memory) offers a sharp critique of the fragility of collective memory within colonial and diasporic contexts. Miranda Mattei employs the phrase “Tracking Issues,” a reference to distorted VHS images, as a metaphor for fragmented, interrupted, and lost narratives. Drawing from Neo-Dada, Pop Art, and Neo-Conceptualism, he uses cynicism and satire to examine Puerto Rican society and government, probing the profound influence of politics and media on collective memory.
As Figueroa notes, Miranda Mattei is widely regarded by his peers as an “artist’s artist,” admired for his singular vision and his willingness to confront controversial subjects. While acutely aware of the political climate shaped by the Trump era, he uses this environment as a catalyst to imagine more inclusive narratives of resistance and resilience. The exhibition offers an incisive commentary on the intersection of politics, media, and memory—one that resonates powerfully in the current moment.
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Miranda Mattei’s work investigates the interplay between memory, personal narrative, history, and the lasting imprint of past events. For those who remember the days of “Be Kind. Please Rewind,” Blockbuster rentals, VCRs, or recording family moments on VHS camcorders, this exhibition carries a particular emotional charge. Anyone who has ever made a mixtape or burned a CD will recognize this work as a meditation on obsolete media from the mid-1980s through the early 2000s—a period that continues to shape Miranda Mattei’s artistic imagination.
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Full Article here: Grabaciones para un País de Memoria Corta
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José A Rosa | Dulce Sueño
June 6 – July 18, 2025
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Dulce Sueño (Sweet Dream) is an exhibition and residency by José A. Rosa that explores queer magical realism through the cultural world of Puerto Rican Paso Fino horses. Dreams often place us inside a warped reality—one where the dreamer becomes the driver of their own destiny. In this body of work, Rosa enters that space of transformation, weaving together set design, dance, photography, text, and installation to create a visual and emotional landscape rooted in memory, desire, and cultural inheritance.
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The Paso Fino horse—known for its elegant, dancer-like gait shaped through centuries of Caribbean history—serves as both subject and metaphor. Rosa has long been fascinated by the distinct characteristics of these horses and the warmth of the communities that surround this tradition. Their rhythmic, four-beat step and refined movement echo a broader Caribbean sensibility—one often described as musical, expressive, and embodied.
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As a queer Caribbean artist, Rosa works within the tension of loving his heritage while confronting the legacies of colonialism, including machismo, homophobia, and colorism. Dulce Sueño opens a dialogue that questions dominant ideas of masculinity, reimagines Caribbean aesthetics, and deconstructs social norms that have historically silenced many voices. The exhibition invites viewers into a space of intentional escapism—one that offers play, tenderness, and liberation at a moment when many freedoms feel increasingly under threat.
Rosa draws inspiration from the ways queer communities embody magical realism simply by existing freely—particularly in Puerto Rico’s ballroom scenes and in the work of trans Caribbean artists who merge performance, activism, and civil disobedience. This spirit also connects to historical movements such as the 1970s Brazilian Cannibalism (Antropofagia) art movement, which sought to consume and transform colonial pasts into new cultural identities.
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The title Dulce Sueño references the most influential sire in the modern Puerto Rican Paso Fino breed, registered in 1927. Within Paso Fino culture, Rosa observes a complex and fascinating tension: while homophobia is often publicly rejected, the language and aesthetics of the practice are filled with terms and images that resonate with queerness. The breed’s name, Paso Fino (“elegant steps”), echoes how “fino” is sometimes used pejoratively toward queer men. The phrase Pisa Flor (“flower steppers”) describes the horse’s delicate gait, conjuring an ethereal visual world. Competition attire—ornate chaps, stylized silhouettes, and performative pageantry—further blurs the lines between tradition, spectacle, and gender expression. Through this lens, Rosa proposes a new visual vocabulary for queer Latine art grounded in this uniquely Caribbean context.
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The exhibition is also deeply personal. Growing up between the mainland U.S. and Puerto Rico, Rosa recalls returning to the island and hearing the Paso Fino’s steps—taca taca taca—echoing along narrow mountain roads on the way to his grandmother’s home. Though he never practiced horseback riding, his connection to this world has always been intimate. A central work in the exhibition, the poem “Para Charlie,” reflects on a teenage friendship with the son of a Paso Fino rider while living in Florida—a relationship marked by tenderness, unspoken desire, and formative emotional discovery.
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Later memories resurface as well: evenings in Luquillo, Puerto Rico, watching riders arrive on horseback dressed in skinny jeans, baseball caps, Jordans, and gold chains shimmering to reggaetón. These moments—half real, half dream—become Rosa’s exercise in magical realism.
As a residency and exhibition, Dulce Sueño will also involve collaboration with local artists and community members. Through a series of installations and interventions, Rosa reimagines his family archive within the context of rural Puerto Rico and examines the social and political consumption of masculinity through everyday gestures, rituals, and performances. The result is an environment that moves between memory and fantasy, critique and celebration, intimacy and spectacle.
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Puerto Rican Women in Arts
by Alexis Figueroa (@trailerparkproj)
March 7-April 19 2025
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It doesn’t take an art expert to recognize that women in the arts around the world have historically been marginalized and overlooked—a reality shaped by systemic patriarchy. Puerto Rico is no exception. Over my twenty years working in the arts, I have witnessed firsthand the disproportionate access to opportunities afforded to women artists. As I began to delve deeper into Puerto Rican art history, I encountered the stories of countless women whose work, innovation, and impact have too often been forgotten or sidelined, frequently overshadowed by their male counterparts.
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This realization sparked a deep commitment to change. While this effort may seem small in the face of such a long history of erasure, I believe it is essential to honor and recognize the contributions of women in the arts, both from the island and across its diaspora.
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After months of extensive research, I reached out to more than 280 artists, inviting them to participate in this project. Although it was not possible to contact everyone, advances in technology and social media made it possible to build what is now the most comprehensive database of living Puerto Rican women artists to date, currently totaling over 330 artists.
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This work does not exist in isolation. It builds on important precedents such as Mari Mater O’Neill’s publication Mujeres artistas protagonistas de los ochenta, which focuses on women artists in Puerto Rico during the 1980s. Other vital references include the 1989 exhibition Mujeres Artistas de Puerto Rico at Plaza Las Américas; the documentary El Legado, produced by the Association of Women Artists of Puerto Rico and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico; the 1993 exhibition Nuestro Autorretrato: Mujeres Artistas de Puerto Rico; and Lisa Ladner’s important El-Status webpage. More recently, the exhibitions Anarquistas y Dialectos 1 & 2 at the MAC and Raquel Torres Arzola’s 2015 article “Viva la resistencia: Women artists in Puerto Rico and outside” have continued to illuminate the urgency and importance of this work.
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With limited resources and no budget, but driven by a shared commitment to justice and visibility, Trailer Park Projects has partnered with El Schomburg to organize a groundbreaking exhibition that will bring together over 140 living and working Puerto Rican women artists in one space—right here in Chicago.
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In alignment with the 2025 International Women’s Day theme, “Accelerate Action,” we intentionally chose March for the opening of this exhibition. Puerto Rican Women in Arts will open to the public on Friday, March 7, followed by an artist talk on March 8. This conversation will explore the history of Puerto Rican women in the arts and the many challenges they have faced—and continue to face.
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To ensure this unprecedented gathering is properly documented, we are working to raise funds for a catalog that will include the names and information of all participating artists, as well as those who could not be reached or were unable to participate. Our goal is to create a lasting record that future generations can use both as an educational resource and as a directory of women artists from Puerto Rico and its diaspora.
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This project is made possible through the invaluable support of collaborators and colleagues, including Raquel Torres Arzola, Maria Josefina Melero, Aisha Perez, Melissa Ramos, Brenda Torres, Mariel Quiñones, and many others.
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