AgitArte: A Working-Artist Collective
2023 Plenary Keynote
Huáscar Robles, 2023 GIA Conference Blog
The very first plenary at the GIA Puerto Rico conference set the stage for one important theme: the inseparable ties between art and social movements. AgitArte, a grassroots storytelling collective, ignited the audience by posting provocative questions about funding for groups on the fringes such as them.
Eddie Torres, GIA’s current president and CEO, opened the session by recognizing Puerto Rico’s richness alongside its political and environmental vulnerability. The statement that Puerto Ricans can’t vote in general elections drew a collective gasp in the San Gerónimo Ballroom, proving how little of Puerto Rico is known on the mainland and why bringing the GIA to our shores was necessary.
“Puerto Rico is considered home to artists who not only create art but also help us survive in dire times and give us relief when we most need it.”
Carlos J. Rodríguez, Executive Director of the Flamboyán Foundation, and Glenisse Pagán, from Filantropía Puerto Rico echoed that sentiment. Rodríguez underlined that artists’ power resides outside of their art. “Puerto Rico is considered home to artists who not only create art but also help us survive in dire times and give us relief when we most need it,” Rodríguez said.
“There are many perspectives of expressing what Puerto Rico is, so you’ll hear what Puerto Rico is from many points of view,” Pagán added.
Luis Miranda, from the Miranda Family Fellowship, gave attendees a task. “If you’re here, you either give in the arts, your world is in the arts, or you were persuasive in convincing your board or your boss to send you to this conference. We know for sure you may have money and knowledge, and you can debate and have a persuasive argument. I want to call on that persuasive argument... to use it to talk to your bosses and your boards to fund Puerto Rico.”
Keynote speaker artist Jorge Díaz explained he has been running AgitArte with Sugeily Rodríguez Lebrón, who wasn’t present at the time. Their interdisciplinary approach to art allows them to reach communities in need not only with a message of hope and resistance but at times with basic needs – shelter, food, clothing – for vulnerable communities on an island marred with hurricanes (Irma, María 2017) and earthquakes (2019). While the organization has roots in Lynn, Massachusetts, it flourished in Puerto Rico as it grew to respond to the island’s social and political shifts.
Díaz highlighted their work along Museo del Barrio (The Santurce-based community museum, not the art institution in East Harlem) in 2006 during the expropriations that Santurce’s Barrio San Mateo experienced. A bulk of this work was spearheaded by AgitArte’s offshoot, Papel Machete, a puppet collective modeled after the legendary, Vermont-based activist group The Bread and Puppet.
“From the grants they receive, they share with others, believing survival is a collective quest.”
AgitArte fosters cultural spaces, has built mutual aid distribution centers, and creates theater productions that educate about our painful colonial history, for example, Episodios del Genocidio Boricua y otros Relatos Deshumanizantes, about the massive, illegal sterilization of Puerto Rican women in the late 1930s. From the grants they receive, they share with others, believing survival is a collective quest.
The question Díaz had for the funders in the audience – some of whom had never heard of them – is, ‘Why are we not the “darling” of the philanthropy world?’ Perhaps without knowing, he had tapped into the frustration smaller and larger funders had aired on many of the GIA sessions: the road to receiving philanthropic aid is littered with bureaucracy and piecemeal-style granting that keeps groups barely above water.
“How much more hoarding will the foundations do until the world collapses, if not now when?... Fund us like you want us to win.”
“If we have to come back every year or every two years to get some funding money, we are blessed for it,” he stated and added, “How much more hoarding will the foundations do until the world collapses, if not now when?... Fund us like you want us to win.”
In spite of their difficulties or perhaps because of them, AgitArte’s latest project La Víspera de la Abolición has indeed received a philanthropic lifesaver. The sci-fi mix of theater, film, puppetry, and stop animation was projected onto the ballroom’s screens, drawing applause from the audience. Hopefully, it will be a start to foster what Miranda, Pagán, and Rodríguez asked at the beginning of the night, “When you return home, don’t forget about Puerto Rico.”
