The Americana–Hispana series, initiated in 1997, marks a pivotal moment in my practice in which personal history, migration, and material culture became inseparable from the structural concerns of painting itself. While formally situated within the Western still-life tradition, these works function less as exercises in pictorial arrangement and more as sites of cultural transmission, where domestic objects operate as carriers of embodied memory, inherited ritual, and diasporic identity.
The series emerges at the intersection of multiple geographies, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and New York, and multiple visual lineages: European academic realism, vernacular domestic culture, and the unselfconscious material intelligence of everyday life. In this sense, Americana–Hispana is neither a nostalgic return nor a strictly autobiographical project. Rather, it constitutes an inquiry into how identity is constructed through use, repetition, and survival, and how objects become repositories of lived systems rather than symbolic stand-ins.
Although the series formally began in 1997, its roots existed starting in 1990 long before I knew they had a name. By the time these paintings emerged, I had already lived in many worlds. I had been formed by La Habana before I had language. I had been returned to New York before I had memory. I was shaped by the South Bronx, by Puerto Rico, by the complex choreography of migration, silence, and assimilation. For years I had been painting still life from my domestic surroundings, working with grids and recurring patterns, trying to unearth something inside myself that had not yet found language. The breakthrough came with my first Americana–Hispana painting (a still life with pearls and yellow ribbon). At that moment, I did not yet possess words capable of holding all of this at once. When I began placing objects of my Hispanic inheritance alongside objects of American domestic life, I was not making a conscious conceptual statement. I was attempting, instinctively, a reconstruction of wholeness.
