<p>For Puerto Rico-based artist Daniel Lind-Ramos, found objects become symbols of life</p>

Rob Goyanes

From raging storms come sculptures and stories

<p>‘Earth will go on without us,’ says Daniel Lind-Ramos. ‘We have to be aware of that.’ This awareness started percolating when the artist was a child. He and other kids in Loíza, a town 20 miles outside of San Juan, Puerto Rico, where Lind-Ramos was born and still lives today, were fascinated by the cycles of the planet. ‘We watched the trees,’ he says. ‘They’d have flowers, and then they’d have fruit that we’d collect, and then we’d watch the fallen fruit get rotten. And then they’d come up again.’</p>


<p>Lind-Ramos is speaking on the phone from his studio. In the background, a rooster sings periodically. ‘I built a little house here from palm-tree leaves,’ he says, ‘with a little outside space.’ As both material and symbol, the coconut palm tree, brought to the Caribbean island by Spanish colonizers around 500 years ago, often appears in the sculptural assemblages he creates.  </p>
<p>As do beads, gloves, rope, TVs, pots, pans, cauldrons, and the occasional machete. The artist, who turned 70 this year, is a local legend known for his art made from everyday objects, for the events and gatherings he organizes, and for collecting things he finds around Loíza. ‘I like to go walking by the sea with a bag,’ he says. ‘Not thinking about taking anything, just walking.’ The people in Loíza know to give him any interesting debris they might find.</p>


<p>Lind-Ramos was making sculptures about tropical cyclones before Hurricane María decimated the island in 2017, resulting in the death of nearly 3,000 people, massive damage and long power outages, compounded by a slow response from the US Federal Government Emergency Agency (FEMA). ‘Those were terrible days,’ he says of that time. ‘There was a lot of debris, for months, for years.’ The storm also brought a new material, and new metaphor, into Lind-Ramos’s practice. ‘A lot of roofs were blue because of the FEMA tarps,’ he says. ‘I remember, for months, seeing those blue tarps around.’ </p>
<p>It was only after the hurricane that major art institutions and blue-chip galleries started to take notice of Lind-Ramos’s work. Included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, his piece <em>María, María</em> (2019) resembles a female figure with coconuts for a head and breasts, rope for hair, and FEMA tarp for a flowing dress. <em>Figura de Poder</em>
(Figure of Power, 2016–18) – shown in the artist’s solo exhibition, ‘SUSTENANCE’, at The Ranch, Montauk, in 2021 – includes a tambourine head with a glove resting against it, as if banging a rhythm or covering a yawn. Mirrors decorate the almost-three-meter-tall figure; a sledgehammer-as-forearm rests on the floor.</p>

<p>Lind-Ramos’s 2023 MoMA PS1 survey ‘El Viejo Griot – Una historia de todos nosotros’ (The Elder Storyteller – A Story of All of Us) included his piece <em>Baño de María</em> (Bath of Mary, 2018–22). The sculpture includes a boat propeller – the first item the artist found while wading through chest-high floodwaters after Hurricane María – as well as twisting trumpets and pipes that signify the storm’s spiral. The work also references Mary, mother of Christ, a crucial figure of Catholicism, the dominant religion in Puerto Rico, which syncretized with indigenous Taíno and West African Yoruba cultures.</p>
<p>In the richly layered readings that Lind-Ramos’s art encourages, the blue tarp not only symbolizes water, but something so obvious that it might elude observation: FEMA itself. The material signals the failure of governments to protect their citizens, to deal with the human-caused acceleration of climate change, and to address the daily disparities in housing and resources between rich and poor, white and Black.</p>

<p>Founded by escaped slaves and freed Black people, Loíza is a hub of West African traditions, kept alive by the town’s <em>afrodescendientes</em> – a long-marginalized group to which Lind-Ramos belongs. He defines art as the following: ‘First you experience life, then you take that experience and make symbols with it. You collect experiences as a human being. And those experiences depend on where you are on the planet.’ His sculptural works are elegant yet densely symbolic, referring to Puerto Rico’s past and present, as well as its global connections. </p>
<p>Assemblages are not only litanies of items, but of histories and labors, too. Lind-Ramos entwines these disparate objects via sewing, tying, welding, and the simple act of adornment. When objects are brought together well, they can have an almost mystical affinity. Lind-Ramos’s assemblages are simultaneously haunting and joyful: inanimate objects turn into animate figures, chaotic gatherings gel into the order of altars. They contain both the suffering and celebration of a community in a specific place, the stuff that signifies a home when it’s not the litter swirling throughout the world. Both abstract and figurative, his sculptures are storyteller and story.</p>

<p>At his studio, Lind-Ramos still has things he found in the wake of Hurricane María. This archive of items – family heirlooms, consumer products, shipping materials, plant matter – reflect not only his tendency for collecting, but the ephemera that inundates the planet. When Lind-Ramos was young, he ‘didn’t want to throw things away,’ he <a href="https://whitney.org/media/42718">says</a>, ‘because they were full of memory for me.’ His art, like the best stories, contains both the sublime and the horrific, tokens of joy and cataclysm alike.</p>
<p>When asked how his work sits with environmentalism, as both a practice and a politics, Lind-Ramos reflects: ‘Many of these objects are not meant to last long. People use them, then they throw them away. And then we have a lot of objects that we call trash.’ Of his strolling the beaches and talking to neighbors, he notes: ‘In the act of collecting, I am thinking about immersing myself in a cycle. I don’t consider all of the objects trash. They are materials for my work.’</p>
<p>Art was never a rarefied thing for Lind-Ramos. ‘My uncle was a mask-maker, like many of the people who live in my community,’ he says. Loíza is known for the Fiestas Tradicionales en Honor a Santiago Apóstol (Festival of Saint James) with its parade of <em>vejigantes</em>: bright-red, devil-like masks, representing European colonizers, amongst other figures. The horned masks left a strong impression on the young Lind-Ramos, but another character had an even bigger impact: <em>el viejo</em> (the old man). ‘That costume reminded me of many old people in my community – not necessarily one particular person – which I loved. <em>El</em> <em>viejo </em>could be a construction worker, or an old medicine man, or a storyteller.’ Like everyone and everything, Lind-Ramos’s sculptures contain many stories. What connects them is plot, character, texture, and color. </p>

<p>In Loíza, lining the edge of a lagoon, is the Piñones Mangrove Forest. The mangroves – a crucial, intertidal ecosystem that helps prevent storm surge – were damaged badly by Hurricane María. Lind-Ramos knows a man in the neighborhood of Piñones who was hired to cut down the mangroves for sugarcane companies that used the wood to build railroads. Today, the mangrove forests are being restored, protected, and used in new ways. Lind-Ramos is also friends with the director of a company that leads kayak tours through the forests. She gifted him some old kayaks for some assemblages he’s currently working on. He’s thinking of both of these people and their stories as he creates his new work. ‘I really love that connection,’ Lind-Ramos says. ‘The worker with the rhythm of the Earth, with the cosmos.’</p>
<hr>
<p>Daniel Lind-Ramos is represented by <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/34301/The-Ranch" target="_blank">The Ranch</a>, Montauk, New York. The artist’s work will be on view in a solo presentation in Art Basel Miami Beach’s Nova sector in December. </p>
<p>Rob Goyanes is a writer and editor from Miami, Florida. His work has appeared in <em>BOMB</em>, <em>e-flux journal</em>, <em>Los Angeles Times</em>, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles, California.</p>
<p>Published on November 2, 2023.</p>
<p>Captions for full-bleed image:&nbsp;<em>El Viejo Griot</em>, 2022-23. Photograph by Oliver Campbell.</p>

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