Rafael Ferrer, Puerto Rican Musician-Turned-Artist, Has Died at 93

Puerto Rican musician-turned-artist Rafael Ferrer has died at age 93, El Museo del Barrio announced last night. Ferrer was “a groundbreaking artist whose singular and influential practice challenged boundaries” across a vast range of mediums and disciplines, stated the New York museum.

In fact, Ferrer first worked as a jazz drummer before moving into visual arts after discovering Surrealist artists and writers during a 1954 trip to Paris. He eventually studied painting with the exiled Spanish Surrealist artist Eugenio Fernández Granell at the University of Puerto Rico. Yet musical improvisation remained a defining influence throughout his practice, which was unusual in its diversity of styles, mediums, and materials. His work ranged from conceptual installations to assemblage sculptures and paintings. He used paper bags and blackboards as canvases, as well as calabash gourds and garbage can lids in hanging, Dada-inspired sculptures, while installations could be made of straw, dried leaves, or ice.

The unusual variety inherent to his practice has also been described as a source of confusion to a critical art world and market, which overlooked his career for years, particularly beginning in the 1980s, when he began painting again. That oversight was belatedly corrected during a 2010 solo museum show at El Museo del Barrio. Titled “Retro/Active: The Work of Rafael Ferrer,” the show featured some 100 works surveying Ferrer’s practice over five decades. The exhibit brought much-deserved attention to Ferrer’s life’s work and was “almost criminally overdue,” per a review by Roberta Smith in the New York Times. The El Museo show led to a succession of additional solo exhibitions, including at Guild Hall in East Hampton (2011), the Lancaster Museum of Art (2012), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2015).

Ferrer was keenly aware of critical responses to his shift away from the conceptual, Process art installations he was known for making in the 1960s and ’70s, which had earned him a reputation as an avant-garde artist, particularly in Puerto Rico, as well with exhibitions at major institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art. One breakthrough leading into that period of acclaim was Ferrer’s 1968 guerrilla action involving driving 87 bushels of fall leaves from Philadelphia to New York in a pickup truck, and scattering them in front of art institutions.

When Ferrer experimented with new forms and styles—as he did in the ’80s with paintings made in a kind of faux naïve, modern expressionist style—his career quieted. “The psychology of the art world and the art market are so ingrained with repetition, making a steady, absolutely, consistently identifiable product much like the auto industry. That has never been the impetus of my work. I have always believed that the doing is what is exciting,” Ferrer told The Brooklyn Rail in 2013. “My earlier life as a musician created in my psyche a sense that what you do is dictated by the needs of the moment, all within a repertoire,” he added.

In fact, Ferrer’s artworks do possess a clear, conceptual through-line, as he explained in the same interview. “When I returned to painting, believe me, those paintings were all about spaces—my attraction to odd spaces with weird light and strange people,” he added. For his portraits of “strange people,” whom he also called his neighbors, “there is a mutual curiosity expressed in conversation, a back and forth I have with them,” he said. “The most problematic thing is familiarity. If I’m totally familiar with something, it’s no longer interesting.”

Art and music, however, never grew too familiar, and his whole life he continued to paint while listening to the latter. “Curiously, when I look at art or when I listen to music, I never seem to exhaust the endless revelations that make both things a continual source of inspiration,” he said.

A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975 and the Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 1993, Ferrer’s works are now in major museum collections around the world.