Daniel Lind-Ramos
Puerto Rican, 1953-
Figura Emisaria , 2020
steel, palm tree branches, dried coconuts, branches, palm tree trunks, wood panels, burlap, concrete blocks, glass aluminum, fabric, lights
108 x 60 x 47 in.
SBMA, Museum Purchase with funds provided by The Luria/Budgor Family Foundation
Daniel Lind-Ramos as the recipient of the 2020 Pérez Art Museum Miami Prize
“This journey into art has been motivated by my personal and collective experiences in relation to my community, the Caribbean region and its connection with African ancestry. Working with my family as both a materials supplier for crafts and as a draftsman myself in the community of Colobo in Loiza, a stronghold of Afro culture in Puerto Rico, has afforded me the connection with materials, tools, and techniques that would later appear in my practice.” – Daniel Lind Ramos, Arte Fuse, 03/31/2020
COMMENTS
In the 2019 Whitney Biennial, a strange figure constructed from rope, burlap, bubble wrap, palm branches, a solar-powered camping lantern, an umbrella frame and brass tacks towered more than two meters high. With a coconut for a head, 'Maria-Maria' (2019) by Daniel Lind-Ramos embodied a tropical goddess, alien and equivocal. The blue FEMA tarp that enveloped her recalled both the Virgin Mary’s mantle and the makeshift dwellings that resulted from the US government’s malignantly inadequate response to Hurricane Maria, which devastated the artist’s native Puerto Rico in 2017. Both protector and destroyer, the commanding 'Maria-Maria' attracted considerable attention for an artist who had hitherto flown mostly under the radar.
In 'Armario de la Memoria’ (Storage of Memory), 66-year-old Lind-Ramos’s first solo show in the continental US, five of the seven works also resemble abstract, monstrous standing figures. The artist employs an idiosyncratic vocabulary of found everyday materials that includes rough fabrics, corroded agricultural implements and household utensils, musical instruments, sporting equipment and various elements of the coconut palms so ubiquitous to Puerto Rico. While their components evoke working-class Caribbean life in places such as Loíza, the small town where Lind-Ramos was born and still lives, the works themselves conjure individual beings of totemic power and obscure purpose.
At almost three meters in height, for example, 'Figura Emisaria' (Emissary Figure, 2020) has a head made from a flat metal crescent, rising above a collar formed of the scalloped ends of palm branches. In place of a torso, a vitrine of glass and brushed aluminium with interior lights – a slick contemporary inclusion in an otherwise hoary ensemble – holds another, smaller vitrine that itself contains a handmade, washboard-shaped grater with a perforated metal surface, perhaps for preparing yucca. The figure recalls, curiously, both a jukebox and Central African Kota reliquary sculptures, but this modern assemblage enshrines a humble object, symbolic of local traditions of sustenance. In their commanding scale and hieratic presence, however, Lind-Ramos’s figures share a closer affinity to the imposing busts of Simone Leigh.
- Joseph R. Wolin, Gods of Disaster: The Hieratic Sculptures of Daniel Lind-Ramos, Frieze, 31 March 2020
https://www.frieze.com/article/gods-disaster-hieratic-sculptures-daniel-lind-ramos
Daniel Lind Ramos studied at the University of Puerto Rico: BA. (1975), New York University: MA. (1979). In 1989 he received the Arana Scholarship where he attended Antonio Segui’s Studio in the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris, France (1989). Painter and assemblage sculptor, at present, he is a retired Senior Professor at the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao Campus. His work has been shown, among others, at the SWEAT Exhibition in Munich, Germany (2021), In the Eye of the Storm, Belgium (2021-2022), Daniel Lind-Ramos: SUSTENANCE Exhibition, The Ranch, Montauk, New York (2021), the 100 Drawing From Now exhibition at the Drawing Center, New York, Storage of Memory at Marlborough Gallery, New York, Whitney Museum Biennial (2019) in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico, 3rd World Festival of the Black Arts (Dakar, Senegal), Kinkeleba Gallery (New York), Puerto Rican Museum of Art, Latin-American Museum of Art (Long Beach, California), Museo del Barrio (New York), Valparaíso Biennial (Chile), Santo Domingo Biennial (Dominican Republic), Grand Palais (Paris, France), and Pantheon Museum of Art, Haiti.
Lind Ramos has received the McArthur Foundation’s Genius Fellowship Award 2021, USA Artist Fellowship Award 2021, Joan Mitchell and African’s Out Residency, the Joan Mitchell Award, the Nada Artadia Award, and the Artsy Vanguard Award. He has also dabbled in the performance medium with the interdisciplinary projects “De Loíza a la Loíza” and “Talegas de la Memoria” sponsored by the Puerto Rican Museum of Contemporary Art. His works are in the collection of Whitney Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, New York, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), LA, Museo del Barrio, New York, Jordan’s Schnitzer Museum of Art, Oregon, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Pérez Art Museum (PAMM), Miami.
https://molaa.org/daniellindramos
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
"Figura Emisaria" evokes a ghostly, humanoid presence through its upright stance and bilateral symmetry. A native of Colobo, an Afro-Puerto Rican community in Loiza, Puerto Rico, Lind-Ramos incorporates traces of the Caribbean region and its connection with Africa. The figure's moon-shaped headdress emulates ceremonial reliquaries like those of the Kota in Central Africa. Its cape is made from a coconut palm tree, which is used tor shelter, trade, arts and crafts, and traditional dishes throughout the Caribbean. A handmade yucca grater is encased in a glass vitrine as.a sacred relic. The artist describes being given the grater by his 92-year-old neighbor, who inherited it from her grandmother: "ln that precious moment, I tell that she was an old emissary, passing to me through the symbolism of her action the ancestral knowledge related to nourishment based on the coconut and the yucca, two of the principal ingredients in our traditional food and two ingredients that were, on many occasions during hazardous times, our source of nourishment ”
- For Opacity, 2022
This assemblage evokes a ghostly, humanoid presence through its upright stance, bilateral symmetry, steel moon-shaped head, and cape-like palm tree trunk. The humbled pierced tin screen in the middle is treated like a relic or a precious jewel in an illuminated museum case. This artwork reminds us of the memories, associations, and for some people the ancestors that course through and inhabit everyday objects. Its title, which translates as “messenger figure,” emphasizes the artwork's role as a bridge between the world things—the everyday world—and some other realm, perhaps that of the artist’s imagination, history, or even beyond the world or appearances.
Daniel Lind Ramos was born in Loiza, Puerto Rico. He has earned degrees at the University of Puerto Rico and New York University and currently is a Senior Professor at the University of Puerto Rico. In 2021, Lind Ramos was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship.
- Contemporary Gallery Opening, 2021