Natural Selections

But here in Puerto Rico’s El Yunque National Forest, it’s not litter at all.

Intertwined with reused textile waste, seeds, stones, and bottle caps, the CD shape hanging from the hot pink string is actually quite beautiful: clanging against metal chimes, while catching the ears of nearby walkers and inviting them to marvel at a sprawling three-dimensional “drawing” with the forest understory as its canvas. 

A few hundred feet down the trail, three white pedestals protrude from the soil to curiously display fragments of enameled asphalt encased in glass. Down the trail even further, another discovery: 300 pounds of dead coral suspend in the canopy overhead on 35 feet of repurposed boat rope in a display that is both subtle and intentional to the turn on the trail. 

Deeply connected to each site along the half-kilometer Science and Conservation Trail of El Portal de El Yunque visitor center, the installations clearly come across as art. Still, there’s something unexpected about intricate and abstract works sitting eye-to-eye with Puerto Rican parrots and Coquí frogs.  

What is an art exhibit doing here?  

For Georgie Vega, founder of theartwalkpr and the person responsible for curating NATURA, the reason for the exhibition is simple: “This had not been done yet”—despite the fact that El Yunque contains a stunning and inspiring ecosystem that, for many Puerto Ricans, is a source of connection to both nature and the Indigenous Taíno ancestors who once called the rainforest home. Vega insists, “as a Puerto Rican, being able to work with artists for so long, I cannot even imagine an artist who wouldn’t want to do a piece in El Yunque.” Indeed, as the only tropical rainforest in the US forest system, El Yunque is unique—both as an ecological destination for visitors and as a sacred place in Puerto Rican culture. Therein lies the opportunity to “use art as a catalyst for human connections, address global environmental challenges, and foster ties to our ancestral roots,” Vega says. 

Prior to founding theartwalkpr, Vega built 20 years of experience conceiving and promoting art in Puerto Rican museums. Needless to say, Vega was thrilled when she was approached to lead the project by the Friends of El Yunque Foundation, along with the US Forest Service, a federal agency that is part of the US Department of Agriculture and was advancing the work out of an agency-wide initiative to make nature more accessible. 

Vega’s enthusiasm and experience aside, it’s one thing to imagine art in a forest, and an altogether more complicated enterprise to install it safely, practically, and sustainably.  

The site of the project, El Yunque’s El Portal visitor center, welcomes over 500,000 visitors per year and is about an hour from San Juan by car. Since the project was designed to sit on federally managed land, it necessitated significant bureaucratic coordination (i.e., “a lot of paperwork”). It also warranted care when selecting artists who were up for the challenge of embracing nature’s constraints. As Vega puts it, the trail is not a “ready-set-go” place to set up art installations. Heavy materials like custom scaffolding had to be hauled in along almost a mile of trail, and the installation surface was, as one would expect, less even and stable than the floor of a museum wing. 

How each installation would react to the environment was also a bit of a mystery. Although the group of artists planned to return to the site every month or so, there has never been a plan in place to keep the works clean and never been an intention to employ guards to keep the works safe. In a sense, artists were encouraged to cede control and view their works less preciously. The idea, Vega explains, is to let the pieces “change and seamlessly fuse with the forest” so that roots, branches, and other life “start growing” around the works and the site “literally becomes a union.” 

Artists might give up control in the process, but there’s clearly something new to be gained, too. 

The NATURA exhibition centers on the idea that it’s possible to consider urgent local issues like resource conservation, climate change, and political activism in more public, inviting, and impactful spaces. 

The installation with enameled asphalt on pedestals shooting up from the ground? It’s a call for viewers to reflect on fossil fuel extraction. The dead coral hanging from the trees on boat rope? It’s a way of connecting life in the sea with life in the forest. (The interpretive labels onsite do well to help hikers make connections such as these.) 

A visitor could very well encounter similar themes explored by artists in another setting—say, a gallery in San Juan. There's something more visceral and potent, however, about seeing, hearing, and even breathing in the very ecosystem embroiled in the issues at hand that helps the ideas resonate. As the dirt scars the PVC and the leaves envelop the coral, you feel that people and nature aren’t so far apart. It also happens that, aesthetically speaking, the ever-weathered installations hardly look like anything that’s been created before. 

It's a project of reciprocity, then, especially if people walk away with new energy to be thoughtful stewards of the world in which we live.  

Without knowing for sure, Vega notes with a smile, “Yeah, I think the forest likes it, too.” 

NATURA will run through the end of July 2024.  

It is supported by the US Forest Service, El Yunque National Forest, Fundación Segarra Boerman, Familia Kehle (Peter, Kathryn, and Kai), Nachman & Guillemard Law, The Art Walk Puerto Rico, Banco Popular de Puerto Rico, Carlos Cabrero/Tres Palmas, Casillas, Santiago & Torres Law, Rachel Templeton, Familia Elías-Sierra, GIB Development, PR3 Investment, Hiram Pérez Arrillaga, Jerry Szilagy, Beatríz Martí Soler, Familia Megwinoff-Rubí, and Diego, Sebastián, and Gastón Vázquez-Guillemard.  

A 2024 grant from Mellon will allow the Friends of El Yunque Foundation to produce new exhibitions on a recurring basis that are supplemented with interpretive programming and potentially an artist residency.