USFCAM Receives $25,000 NEA Grant for 'Constant Storm: Art from Puerto Rico and the Diaspora'

(TAMPA, FL – July 8, 2020) National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Mary Anne Carter has approved more than $84 million in grants as part of the Arts Endowment’s second major funding announcement for fiscal year 2020. Included in this announcement is an Art Works grant of $25,000 to the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum, part of the USF College of The Arts, to support the exhibition Constant Storm: Art from Puerto Rico and the Diaspora. Art Works is the Arts Endowment’s principal grantmaking program. The agency has approved 1,015 awards in this category for a total of $25,334,900.

“These awards demonstrate the continued creativity and excellence of arts projects across America and the nimbleness of our nation’s arts organizations in the face of a national crisis that shuttered their doors for months” said Mary Anne Carter, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “By funding arts projects in every U.S. state, territory, and the District of Columbia, the National Endowment for the Arts again celebrates the opportunity to make the arts available to every corner of the country and to see how the arts can heal and unite us.”

With funding from the NEA Art Works grant, the USF Contemporary Art Museum will present Constant Storm: Art from Puerto Rico and the Diaspora, which will gather, display, record and conceptualize artistic responses to Hurricane Maria by artists from Puerto Rico and the diaspora. The exhibition will present artists’ individual and collaborative responses, illustrate the challenges faced by artists after the storm, and reveal the largely unpublished record of artists’ reflections on post-Maria Puerto Rico. Through artworks and their narratives and socially engaged initiatives, voices from the island and Puerto Rican communities in New York and Florida will materialize a synoptic view of Puerto Rico’s fragile recovery as part of an evolving, 121-year-old historical crisis.

Artists include Rogelio Baez Vega (New York), Sofía Gallisá Muriente (San Juan), Jorge González Santos (San Juan), Karlo Andrei Ibarra (San Juan), Ivelisse Jiménez (New York), Miguel Luciano (New York), Natalia Lassalle Morillo (Los Angeles), Angel Otero (New York), Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz (Orlando), SkittLeZ-Ortiz (New York), Gabriel Ramos (Tarpon Springs), Jezabeth Roca González (Tampa-Añasco), Gamaliel Rodríguez (San Juan), and Yiyo Tirado Rivera (San Juan).

Media will include painting, sculpture, drawing, video and installation. Sofîa Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo have been commissioned to produce a video installation titled I-4, that will explore the experience of Puerto Ricans who have been displaced to Florida cities such as Orlando and Kissimmee. Among many works will be Angel Otero’s meditational, draped paintings, Miguel Luciano’s Pimp My Piragua, a customized pushcart tricyle with sound system, video and LEDs, Yiyo Tirado’s Depresión Tropical, a neon sculpture powered by a generator, and Gamaliel Rodríguez’s ghostly drawings of airport control towers all over Puerto Rico that were closed after Hurricane Maria.

Constant Storm: Art from Puerto Rico and the Diaspora is curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné, CAM Curator at Large, and Noel Smith, CAM Deputy Director and Curator of Latin American and Caribbean Art, and is organized by the USF Contemporary Art Museum. The exhibition will be on view September through December 2021 and will include free educational programs.

For more information on this National Endowment for the Arts grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news.

About USF Contemporary Art Museum

USF Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM) organizes and presents significant and investigative exhibitions of contemporary art from Florida, the United States and around the world. Serving as a teaching laboratory, USFCAM’s curatorial and socially engaged initiatives and educational programs are designed to present the students, faculty, and community with current issues of contemporary art practice, and to explore the role of the arts in society. USFCAM publishes relevant catalogues, presents critically recognized traveling exhibitions and commissions new projects by national and international artists. USFCAM maintains the university’s art collection, comprising more than 5000 contemporary art works.