A second piece, “María Guabancex,” is named for the tantrum-prone Taino goddess of wind and chaos, whose destructive ire, sparked by climate change, is expressed as a furious sculptural whirl of ropes, cables and palm branches.

One, “Baño de María (Bain-Marie/The Cleansing)” focuses on the industrially produced global warming that is generating freakish storms and raising seas to island-drowning levels. The 2019 Whitney Biennial’s example isn’t in the show, but three other “Maria” pieces are. (“Ambulancia” is, among other things, about meeting repeated emergencies when resources are scarce and humanitarian aid withheld.) But they can also be global and deep, as is suggested in the artist’s series of Marian-themed sculptures. The effects of colonialism can be piercingly specific. A ragged, hand-pushed juggernaut of a vehicle it incorporates auto parts, emergency lights, discarded shoes, a mattress stripped to the springs, and a wheelbarrow to carry the dead. A recently completed sculpture called “Ambulancia,” alludes to all three disasters. The crippling realities of the storm, which was followed in 2020 by a series of earthquakes and Covid-19, pervade much of the work, some of which is composed from debris left behind. They set it apart from everything else, as if on an altar, in a niche-like west-facing window, with open sky and the Hudson River as backdrop. Whatever the work’s meanings, the Whitney curators accurately gauged its potency. The head was a lacquered coconut her oceanic cloak was a plastic FEMA tarp.Īll of this, along with the echoing title, suggested a weave of clashing cultural and political references: to the benign Christian figure of the Virgin Mary, to the moody Afro-Caribbean sea goddess Yemaya and to the murderous storm that had desolated Puerto Rico two years earlier. The materials she was composed from were unusual, certainly in a Whitney context. In the case of the 2019 Whitney Biennial, the memory of a regally enigmatic sculpture titled “María-María” by the Puerto Rican artist Daniel Lind-Ramos won’t let go.Īt a little over six feet tall, it was of half- abstract, assemblage-style female figure, her body draped in a sea-blue cloak, her head a blank-faced oval, her long, thin arms curving downward as if open for embrace. I often remember big museum roundups of new art for a single standout entry.

A sky beyond the storm release date