Opening Reception for Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz’s Llevame Pa’l Monte (The Mountains Are Calling and I Must Go)

“The June and JuneAllcott Gallery aspart of the Department of Art and Art History at the University of North Carolina is pleased to present Llevame Pa’l Monte (The Mountains Are Calling and I Must Go), the new work of Puerto Rican artist and professor, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz. As a Puerto Rican of the American diaspora, Raimundi-Ortiz has contributed significantly to developing both Puerto Rican and broader Latinx art forms, exploring the experiences that evolve in response to new urban realities. Llevame Pa’l Monte is a new installation of large-scale drawings that furthers a practice deeply intertwined with the island’s colonial history, migration experiences, and the search for identity within new and shifting cultural contexts. A series of vignettes, filled with entwined vines and tropical foilage embed the viewer in a blanched landscape, tinged with breaths of color. Walking barefoot, submersion in water,and lying down on the forest floor, Raimundi-Ortiz’ drawings channelthe grounding or earthing effects of Puerto Rico’s vibrant nature. Archipelagic in form and liminal in space these works hover delicately between memory, reality, and erasure. In the knots and twists of our bejuco–the perennial jungle vine–we find a past, present, and future already threaded through one another, tied into inseparable mass. It is in these otros saberes (other ways of knowing) and reconnection that one seeks where we can find our home.”

–Roxana Perez-Mendez, Associate Professor of Art, UNC