Claire Oliver Gallery is presenting We AmeRícans, a group exhibition curated by photographer and curator Ruben Natal-San Miguel that convenes multiple generations of Puerto Rican and Puerto Rican-descendant artists working across painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, textiles, and mixed media. Drawing its title from Tato Laviera’s poem “AmeRícan,” the show positions cultural hybridity and community as central through-lines, using art to surface narratives of identity, resilience, and the everyday histories of the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York City and beyond.
The curatorial approach frames the exhibition as both documentation and preservation. Rather than presenting a single thesis, Natal-San Miguel organizes the works as a composite record—personal storylines that, taken together, trace shared experiences of migration, labor, and cultural pride. The premise is that visual practices do more than reflect life in Puerto Rican and Nuyorican communities; they help maintain an intergenerational archive that links artists to neighborhoods, family memory, and civic institutions.
The gallery situates the project within its ongoing commitment to artists whose work broadens the public’s understanding of history and identity. By dedicating the Harlem space to a multivocal presentation rooted in Puerto Rican experience, the program underscores a long urban continuum in which art making, organizing, and institution building are interdependent. The exhibition’s New York setting is not incidental; it is a core part of the narrative, connecting studio practice to the city’s longstanding Puerto Rican cultural life.
The artist roster includes Carlos Betancourt, Elsa María Meléndez, Erica Morales, Ruben Natal-San Miguel, Dave Ortiz, Felix Plaza, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Nitza Tufiño, Beatriz Williams, James Cuebas, and Danielle de Jesus. Their practices are materially diverse yet convergent in subject: everyday scenes, intergenerational bonds, and the texture of working lives. Betancourt’s career in performative installation provides an outward-facing counterpoint to the exhibition’s more intimate objects, while other contributions anchor the presentation in printmaking, textile traditions, and narrative painting.
Institutional lineages are explicit. Nitza Tufiño—co-founder of El Museo del Barrio and Taller Boricua Printmaking Studio—links the show to a decades-long infrastructure of Puerto Rican arts in New York, emphasizing that cultural work often includes founding spaces, training younger artists, and maintaining community workshops. James Cuebas extends this thread through his involvement with the Rafael Tufiño Printmaking Workshop in East Harlem and the Lower East Side Printshop, where he is actively exploring gum bichromate, lithography, silkscreen, and monoprinting. The inclusion of these networks clarifies that process and place are inseparable in the exhibition’s narrative.
The presentation also brings newer institutional visibility into view. Danielle de Jesus—whose background includes graduate training at Yale and participation in a Whitney Biennial, alongside recent work shown at MoMA PS1—introduces a younger voice that moves fluidly between academic, museum, and community contexts. Her presence reinforces the show’s intergenerational structure: established artists, workshop-based practitioners, and emerging contributors share space without hierarchical separation.
Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz contributes work shaped by a hybrid vocabulary—European portraiture, comics, performance, and folkloric references—deployed to address race, trauma, and repair. The artist’s track record at major institutions, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, as well as participation in international biennial formats, further situates We AmeRícans within a transregional context. These ties do not simply credential the show; they signal the circulation of Puerto Rican voices across platforms while remaining grounded in community narratives.
Textile, print, and craft-adjacent practices carry particular weight. Elsa María Meléndez—recognized with the Smithsonian’s People’s Choice Award at American Portraiture Today—positions needlework and fabric as instruments of storytelling and critique. Her approach underscores how domestic and “applied” arts operate as vectors of political memory when mobilized by artists attentive to form and labor. The curatorial framework places these materials alongside painting and photography without hierarchy, reflecting a broader conversation in contemporary art about mediums historically coded as craft.
Erica Morales, a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, foregrounds the dual role of educator and artist within New York City. Her presence in the exhibition adds a pedagogical dimension to the narrative, acknowledging the classroom, the workshop, and the studio as mutually reinforcing sites where cultural knowledge is transmitted. The emphasis on mentorship—formal and informal—reappears across the artist list and ties directly to the exhibition’s preservationist logic.
New and emerging perspectives are given deliberate space. Painter Beatriz Williams, the youngest participant, addresses the links and distances between Puerto Rican heritage and family life in New York, tracing an intimate sense of longing that is as much about memory as geography. Felix Plaza appears in a gallery debut that introduces a developing voice in printmaking and painting. In both cases, the curatorial choice is less about novelty than about continuity—how the next generation absorbs, modifies, and re-states shared themes.
Historical context is articulated with specificity. The exhibition points to the mid-20th-century migration that reshaped New York, when a combination of economic pressure on the island, expanding job opportunities in the city, and accessible air travel drew large numbers of Puerto Ricans to the mainland. By the mid-1960s, more than one million Puerto Ricans had settled in the United States, with New York becoming the largest cultural center outside the island. This background is not treated as a backdrop; it is used to clarify how social and economic shifts inform subject matter, materials, and community structures that artists document and reinterpret.
The show further acknowledges the central role of Puerto Rican women in New York’s garment industry, particularly in the Lower East Side. By naming this labor history, the presentation ties studio production to a broader economy of making—factory floors, workshops, and domestic spaces where skill, creativity, and interdependence sustained families and neighborhoods. The curatorial choice to connect textiles and garment work underscores how material practices in the gallery resonate with longstanding forms of craft and care.
Across the installation, medium diversity is treated as evidence of narrative range rather than a checklist. Painting and photography appear alongside printmaking, textiles, sculpture, and mixed media to suggest that a diaspora is plural by definition. The reference to Laviera’s “AmeRícan” underlines this point by invoking a literary tradition that has, for decades, articulated identity as a composite—language, memory, neighborhood, and migration entwined. The exhibition’s structure—intergenerational, multi-platform, and anchored in specific community institutions—gives that idea concrete form.
Natal-San Miguel’s own practice helps explain the exhibition’s tone and method. His photographs are held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and El Museo del Barrio, among others—placements that reflect a sustained engagement with cities, street life, and the people who animate them. Here, that sensibility translates into a curatorial strategy that privileges lived experience and community record over spectacle, and that treats each work as a partial account within a larger civic history.
Taken together, We AmeRícans reads as a statement on presence and continuity. It assembles established figures, workshop-based practitioners, and emerging artists to demonstrate how cultural memory persists—through institutions founded and sustained by artists, through intergenerational teaching, and through materials chosen for their resonance with everyday labor. The result is a structured, unsentimental view of Puerto Rican identity as it is lived and represented across New York and the broader diaspora.
Venue and dates: Claire Oliver Gallery, Harlem, New York — On view November 5, 2025–January 3, 2026; champagne reception with the artists Friday, November 7, 6–8 p.m.; press release issued October 3, 2025.
