María de los Sustentos

Daniel Lind-Ramos’s majestic sculptural assemblages refer to traditions both specific to his historically Black community of Loíza, Puerto Rico and shared throughout the African diaspora. María de los Sustentos is an intricate relief assemblage extending from the wall to the floor, comprised of cooking implements, wood panels, burlap fabric, a fish net, oars, and tools, accented with sections of blue tarp. Imbued with the frontality, symmetricity, and volume of a baroque altarpiece, the work evokes both the benevolence of the Virgin Mary while also recalling through its haphazard materiality the devastation of Hurricane Maria which ravaged Puerto Rico in September 2017. Here the blue tarp connotes both protection and destruction as it recalls the utilitarian, but inadequate coverings distributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency after the storm, while the reclaimed cooking implements allegorize the unification of Puerto Rican communities around survival and sustenance.