Organized in conjunction with Hidrante, San Juan, Vaivén: 21st-Century Art of Puerto Rico and Its Diaspora, is a multidisciplinary exhibition spanning twenty-five years of Puerto Rican artistic production from forty-three artists working in Puerto Rico and its U.S. diaspora. Derived from Spanish for “back-and-forth movement,” vaivén is most associated with the supposed ease at which Puerto Ricans migrate between the United States and Puerto Rico. Beyond the comings and goings of travel, this word names decades of physical and cultural ebb and flow that have resulted in more persons of Puerto Rican descent living across the fifty United States than in Puerto Rico itself. In turn, to be Puerto Rican is to be inextricably linked to diaspora, Black and Caribbean epistemologies, and a constant reimagining of home and belonging.

Works in the exhibition bear witness to a quarter century of cultural, political, and migratory oscillations, while challenging dominant cultural narratives of “island” post-disaster resiliency versus “mainland” diasporic neither-here-nor-there identity. Rather than following a linear trajectory, the exhibition documents Puerto Rican artistic production across time and place to challenge the geographic and cultural authenticity, racialization, and classism that have shaped which voices define Puerto Rican contemporary art, and which continue to be devalued.