Artist collaborators include Amara Abdal Figueroa, Karla Claudio, Carola Cintrón Moscoso, Beatriz Lizardi, Leila Mattina, and Rosaura Rodríguez.
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s Unruly Subjects examines the Smithsonian Institution as a home for Puerto Rican cultural heritage. In 2022, the artists participated in the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, which gave them access to the Teodoro Vidal Collection of Puerto Rican History at the National Museum of American History, and to Taíno objects from Puerto Rico collected by Jesse Walter Fewkes at the National Museum of Natural History. Fewkes was a Smithsonian anthropologist sent to Puerto Rico as the Spanish-American War (1898) ended to collect Indigenous objects from the United States’s new “territory.” Vidal was a Puerto Rican government official and self-taught historian whose gift of more than 3,000 objects from the Island constituted one of the largest donations in Smithsonian history.
Time spent with these collections fueled the artists’ interest in the materials and design strategies used to protect and house Smithsonian objects, in contrast with the original homes from which these objects were taken, illustrating the difference between institutional space and the living histories preserved in Puerto Rico by countless individuals.
In response, Gallisá Muriente and Lassalle-Morillo commissioned contemporary Puerto Rican artists working with clay, cotton, and natural pigments—materials used by inhabitants of the archipelago for centuries—to create works inspired by the collection. Conceived with theatre designer Carlos J. Soto, Unruly Subjects brings to life the many actors involved in amassing and preserving the material culture of Puerto Rico. Juxtaposing reimagined spaces of collections care with a series of videos and reimagined objects, Lassalle-Morillo and Gallisá Muriente endeavor to connect the Smithsonian collection objects and their origins in Puerto Rico, while also examining the collecting histories of Fewkes and Vidal.