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In Puerto Rico, Artists Rebuild and Reach Out

Zilia Sánchez, 91, in her pre-war wooden studio, where many young artists learned to paint, including Jorge González. Much of her artwork was destroyed. “It was a time capsule where 40 years of artistic practice was stored, stacked with drawings and canvases,” said Klaus Biesenbach, a frequent visitor who returned last fall after the storm. “Seeing it like this was devastating.” Former students are helping her rebuild.Credit...Christopher Gregory for The New York Times

Klaus BiesenbachChristopher Gregory and

In the wake of Hurricane Maria’s crushing devastation of Puerto Rico, leaving half the island without power and the official death toll rising, Klaus Biesenbach, the director of MoMA PS1 and chief curator at large for the Museum of Modern Art, and Christopher Gregory, a Puerto Rican photojournalist based in New York, traveled together to see how artists were facing the challenges of a post-disaster island.

Through decades of economic hardship, and years of financial crisis, the art world in Puerto Rico has had to learn to survive during lean times through a new artistic “sharing” economy — sharing knowledge; resources; and access to infrastructure, materials and spaces. Might these artists now serve as an example — and catalyst — for other communities?

In Santurce, a district in San Juan, the visitors found Zilia Sánchez, 91, in the remnants of her studio where she had worked for nearly 50 years. Sunlight streamed through the jagged beams. There were no tarps to protect the roofless houses in her neighborhood, but Ms. Sánchez considered herself fortunate. Born in Havana in 1926, she settled here after years working abroad and is one of the most influential art teachers in Puerto Rico. Now her former students, including Jorge González, had come to help her rebuild her studio which she envisions with a protective concrete box around it, so she could continue to create the shaped paintings, suggesting female bodies, which look like ocean waves.

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Water damage in Ms. Sánchez’s studio.Credit...Christopher Gregory for The New York Times

Mr. González is now an internationally recognized artist who will be featured in a group show in July at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He took his teacher’s example to heart and extended his artistic practice to what can be called “social practice” — creating spaces for collective learning. He developed the Escuela de Oficios (Trade School), engaging participants in traditional artisanal techniques, including weaving with plant-based materials found in nature.

In Naranjito, the island’s central region, Mr. Biesenbach and Mr. Gregory found Mr. González and Chemi Rosado-Seijo teaching a lace workshop with local children from an elementary school. Mr. Rosado-Seijo is an artist whose practice also combines community engagement and collaboration. Since 2002 he has been active in El Cerro, a rural, working-class neighborhood in the mountains of Naranjito, where he helps residents paint their houses a green shade of their choosing, in a community-building exercise that emphasized its hillside surroundings.

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Jorge González’ in his studio in Santurce, a district of San Juan. His work focuses on land use and artisan practices. He and Chemi Rosado-Seijo have rescued a traditional weaving technique from the town of Naranjito. This component of Mr. González’s social practice focuses on documenting the technique, its artisans and teaching the practice to current residents of the town.Credit...Christopher Gregory for The New York Times

Now the foliage here is bare, and he has helped cover the community center with a large blue tarp to save it from the unrelenting, torrential rain. The school was being used as a homeless shelter for survivors of the hurricane; the lace workshop was conducted in its courtyard.

An art world that has survived through modest circumstances, constantly prepared for small emergencies, has left artists better equipped for the big one. In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Biesenbach and Mr. Gregory said they found many artists eager to help one another and their communities. These are edited excerpts from a conversation, conducted by Ariana McLaughlin, a photo editor on the Culture desk of The Times.

How do you explain social practice to someone who’s never heard that term before?

KLAUS BIESENBACH Artists are engaged with images that surround us daily, and they also make images, but often artistic practice is also a political and social practice, because you change the environment in which we all live.

Is social practice more important now because of the hurricane?

BIESENBACH In Puerto Rico, social practice was very important for the last 10 years [because] Puerto Rico was undergoing a crisis already. The artists we visited were already active in social practice, in education and helping with youth projects, and with installing water filters. Art was very helpful to reassign responsibilities. Everybody, every single citizen, has creative powers and should use them in the process of making a better society, and artists are privileged. They’re the most creative and they find the most convincing, and also the most utopian, forms.

CHRISTOPHER GREGORY The arts community in a way is uniquely equipped to answer those calls, because large institutions can’t move as quickly as individuals who have inroads into these areas.

How do you define art?

BIESENBACH For me art is changing how people look at the world. It’s a disruption. It makes us look at the world differently.

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El Yunque Rain Forest after Hurricane Maria.Credit...Christopher Gregory for The New York Times

What was the catalyst for going to Puerto Rico?

BIESENBACH We made a Facebook exchange group. We collected all the addresses, all the contact information. We asked, What do you need in case of a hurricane? We did this before Irma, and everybody was connected. And then Irma didn’t really hit so badly but we had the people communicating. Then, we helped with fund-raisers. It was just necessary, after we had been in contact with certain help organizations, to go down on-site and visit artists we had worked with, to see what was needed now. And without using up anybody’s resources. I was driving with a friend who had a car, staying with a friend. Chris was staying with family.

What surprised you the most once you arrived?

BIESENBACH The sheer size of the destruction. As you were driving, and you’re driving further, you have landslides, and then you’re driving through El Yunque [National Forest, in northeastern Puerto Rico] and it looks like a bomb fell. Nearly the whole forest, 28,000 acres, was defoliated, no leaves, and giant trees were upside down. When you are on an island, you can’t find an end to the hurricane’s impact. It was so destroyed. I was very shocked by this.

GREGORY There were places you’ve seen your entire life that have these layers of memory and are now gone. I think the hardest thing for me was the realization that Puerto Rico is never really going to be the same.

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A view from Zilia Sánchez’s studio in Santurce, of the demolished neighborhood.Credit...Christopher Gregory for The New York Times

BIESENBACH We went to Zilia Sánchez’s studio. I had just been there last winter when she was preparing her Venice Biennale art, and I had seen pieces from the ’70s and ’80s. Now it was just a pile of garbage. We walk in, there’s no ceiling. And she was very level headed! There she is, 91. She had high heels and a tank top on and she looked great and energetic. We saw art being destroyed, but not spirits being destroyed. She was amazing.

What was your biggest takeaway from the trip?

GREGORY Now more than ever, Puerto Rico needs artists taking things like humor, taking aesthetic beauty and using that to shed light on some of the hardships and the atrocities that are happening on the island.

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Chemi Rosado-Seijo, social practice artist, in the El Cerro community where he has been working for 15 years, gradually painting the houses.Credit...Christopher Gregory for The New York Times

What’s happening in the photograph taken outside the school?

BIESENBACH Chemi [Rosado-Seijo] and Jorge [González] are teaching a lacing workshop, and it’s beautiful because not only the kids, but also the parents came to help with this crocheting. It’s normally done in this big gymnasium, but that became a homeless shelter.

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Jorge González, second from right, and Chemi Rosado-Seijo, fourth from right, teaching lacemaking and weaving in Naranjito outside a school that was being used as a shelter for hurricane survivors.Credit...Christopher Gregory for The New York Times

GREGORY The artists had a relationship with the community before, but the first month after the hurricane, it took a big psychological toll. I think that this is a beautiful moment, witnessing the healing properties of social practice and art.

What’s the significance of the painted green homes in this photograph?

BIESENBACH Fifteen years ago, Chemi offered to help everyone who has a house in El Cerro paint it in different shades of green. It was really an incredible experience to see this social sculpture, conceived, made, painted, and it survived the hurricane! With the vegetation around it nearly gone, the greens of the community, all the different shades of the houses, stood up so beautifully. And everybody’s proud of it, and he knows everybody. He has been welcomed in every household.

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El Cerro is a working-class community in the municipality of Naranjito, where Chemi Rosado-Seijo has been engaged in social practice art, helping residents paint houses shades of green to blend into the lush foliage of the hill.Credit...Christopher Gregory for The New York Times
A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: In Puerto Rico, Artists Rebuild And Reach Out. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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