The Great Migration: Carlos Rolón

Carlos Rolón’s The Great Migration features a new body of work exploring the history of the Caribbean diaspora together with specific experiences of his own childhood spent between Chicago and his family’s native Puerto Rico. These works invoke a broader narrative of identity in the face of shifting cultures, how our past can inform our own sense of self, and how our cultural heritage can be celebrated despite the complex histories and fraught challenges of bygone eras.

Rolón’s tile works incorporate historic, hand-made ceramics together with today’s mass-produced tiles, suggesting a sense of tension, destruction, decay, beauty, and ultimately the hopeful possibility of cultural harmony. They are complimented by the artist’s recent graphite drawings referencing early government propaganda photographs used to prop-up American’s sense of prosperity during the New Deal era. In recreating these nearly centuries-old photos, Rolón looks back on the troubled history of his ancestry and delicately redraws his vision of resilience and optimism upon these symbols of institutional insensitivity.

Rolón’s recent canvas works extend these narratives via tropical floral paintings embellished with 24kt gold leaf in a nostalgic homage to the floral wallpapers from his childhood home. These works also reference the destruction and rebirth of Puerto Rico’s flora and fauna as the Spanish cleared the land while mining the gold.

This exhibition acknowledges the complex stories that shape the identities of immigrants, emigrants and the many new generations of native-born Americans, injecting such history with images of immense beauty and abundance in celebration of lives well lived in the face of many challenges.