Mid – February 2019

Introduction

Readers (all 14 of you – thanks to each of you) of my blog will surely have noted my interest in the wall art I see around San Juan. I saw something the other day that caught my attention. That caused me to think about some of the works I had seen. Hence this post.

I thought I would try to identify themes in the works. I found this quite challenging – easy for some, impossible (at least for me) for others. So here are some of the themes I’ve identified and examples for each.

Politics

Some of the street art is distinctly political. Consider the example below. By the way, I’ve written about Puerto Rico’s status before. Click here to see that post.

Puerto Rican Flag

I suppose this could be political as well. Many artists use the flag as a central part of their work. To me, the flag is sometimes a design element, sometimes a major theme. See the examples below.

India

I’ve noticed a couple of examples of wall art that evoke the Indian sub-continent. I can’t quite figure out why. There are, by my informal observations, very few people here of that heritage. I know of only two Indian restaurants in all of San Juan, and I think one is out of business.

Some Caribbean islands have a substantial population from India. The British abolished slavery in the early 1830s. Sugar cane is a labor intensive industry and estate owners on British islands had to turn to an indentured-servant system for their workers. Some of them came from India. Trinidad and Tobago, for example, have a substantial population of people descended from Indian sugar cane workers.

But that was not true in the Spanish colonies. Slavery continued until the 1870s and slaves still provided labor. So I don’t know why images that evoke India occasionally appear on the walls here.

Women

Women often appear on the wall art here, as the two examples above show. Here are some more.

Full disclosure: The next image is not from Puerto Rico. It is on a wall near the open air market in Rochester, NY. But our friends Antonia and Thomas tell me that is a Puerto Rican neighborhood. I posit the artists were displaced from San Juan, and but for that the art would have been here. Anyway, that is my theory and I’m sticking to it.

Other Themes

I’ll save examples of other themes for another post. I will show one below to pique your interest. Just think of what it would be like for this creature to give you a back rub. I call this theme Fanciful Animal.

Puzzlement

I said in the beginning I had seen something that caught my eye. It was in Santurce, in an area with few other examples of street art. I’m not quite sure what to make of it.

I have to think this is the work of an artist with a fetish for women’s underwear, red at that. I wonder who it is. Is it the guy at the gym, on the treadmill next to me? Is it the bartender at the Video Bar? I suppose it could be a woman – is it one of the baristas in the Starbucks I go to, in Condado?

Thoughts like this keep me awake at night.

Notes and Sources

The images are all mine, enhanced in various ways in Adobe Lightroom and/or Photoshop.