The Trienal Poligráfica de San Juan is the continuing institutional argument that printmaking and the graphic image are sufficient ground on which to build a continuing international biennial in the contemporary art field. The programme was reformulated in 2004 by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (ICP) from the older Bienal de San Juan del Grabado Latinoamericano y del Caribe — the print biennial founded in 1970 under the directorship of Ricardo Alegría at the ICP, on the suggestion of the Catalan-Puerto Rican printmaker Lorenzo Homar (returned to the island in 1968 from a sabbatical in Europe) and developed by the Italian gallerist Luigi Marrozzini of the Galería Colibrí, the only San Juan gallery then dedicated to printmaking. The biennial ran for thirteen editions across thirty-one years, expanded its name to include y del Caribe in 1986, and closed with its final edition in 2001.
The 2004 reformulation, inaugurated under the chief curatorship of the San Juan-born curator Mari Carmen Ramírez (then Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) with the co-curators Justo Pastor Mellado, Harper Montgomery, José Ignacio Roca and Margarita Fernández Zavala, kept the regional axis — Latin America and the Caribbean — and the institutional home (the ICP at the Antiguo Asilo de la Beneficencia and the Antiguo Arsenal de la Marina Española in Old San Juan) but reorganised the structure around the wider category of the polygraphic. The neologism was the institutional move that mattered: the new triennial would not be a print biennial under a different schedule but the working argument that the graphic image — paper, printing, multiple, edition, the trace of a matrix — could be the contemporary medium across photography, video, installation, design and digital media. The inaugural title — Trans/Migraciones: La gráfica como práctica artística contemporánea — set the thesis with the directness of a manifesto.
An institution rebuilt out of an exhibition
The 2024 edition, Bajo Presión, is the institutional demonstration that the polygraphic argument has held — across a five-edition record interrupted by the indefinite suspension announced in October 2018 of what would have been the fifth edition, attributed at the time to the post-Hurricane María budget crisis of the ICP. The 2024 instalment was organised by chief curator Elvis Fuentes (Puerto Rican curator long associated with El Museo del Barrio in New York) with Lisa Ladner as Puerto Rico curator and the curatorial-liaison and educational programme director Ismari Caraballo Milanés; it presented 103 artists from 20 countries across two principal venues in Old San Juan — the Antiguo Arsenal de la Marina Española at La Puntilla and the Galería La Sede in the Antiguo Asilo de la Beneficencia, the ICP's institutional seat — and developed an extended satellite programme of more than fifty additional exhibitions across Puerto Rico. A controversy in the days before the opening, in which Lisa Ladner was briefly suspended from her duties amid disagreements over the inclusion of a work by the Puerto Rican artist Garvin Sierra, became the public framing of the edition's title.
The structural feature that distinguishes the San Juan triennial from the older and larger Latin American biennials (Havana, founded 1984; São Paulo, 1951; Mercosul, 1997) is the continuing commitment to the medium. The Curitiba, Mercosul and São Paulo programmes are organised by curatorial theme across the full contemporary art field; the San Juan triennial is organised by the working figure of the graphic — paper as raw material, printing as method, multiple as ontology — and asks each edition's curatorial team to demonstrate how the contemporary expansion of that figure has continued. The 2009 edition under Adriano Pedrosa (with Jens Hoffmann, Julieta González and Beatriz Santiago) returned to publications, typography, currency, newspapers, archives, flags and books as the working materials of the polygraphic. The 2012 edition under Deborah Cullen, El Panal / The Hive, took the hive as the working figure for the swarm-logic of contemporary print production. The 2015 edition under Gerardo Mosquera, Vanessa Hernández Gracia and Alexia Tala, Displaced Images / Images in Space, took the displacement of the image — across territory, across screen, across medium — as the polygraphic condition. Each edition has been an argument about what graphic practice has become; the 2024 edition under Fuentes and Ladner is the latest such argument, made under the post-2017 institutional conditions of the ICP.
