BIOGRAPHY
Bayamón, Puerto Rico, 1984
Sarabel Santos-Negrón is a contemporary artist, educator, and museum professional. Her artwork is informed by the study of nature through its social, political, and ecological territories. She earned an MFA in Studio Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore; an MA in Museum Studies from Caribbean University, Puerto Rico; a BFA in Painting and Art History from the University of Puerto Rico; and Art History studies from Fundación Ortega y Gasset in Toledo, Spain.
Santos-Negrón has exhibited both nationally and internationally, with recent shows at La Poli/Gráfica de Puerto Rico: América Latina y el Caribe (San Juan), Museo de Arte de Caguas (Caguas), Coleccionismo Contemporáneo de Arte Latinoamericano (Bogotá), Chico Art Center (California), Large Arts Studios (Seattle), El Museo del Barrio (New York), and the Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art (San Juan). She has been featured as a visiting lecturer at Universidad Veracruzana (Mexico), Princeton University (New Jersey), the University of Virginia (Virginia), Columbia University (New York), and the University of Cincinnati (Ohio).
Santos-Negrón has participated in residencies and research programs, including Puertas Adentro (Uruguay), Caribbean Linked VI (Oranjestad, Aruba), Creativity in Place (North Carolina), Palmer Project (Bayamón), St. Mary’s Artist House (Maryland), the Herbarium of the University of Puerto Rico (San Juan), and a self-conducted residency and ongoing research project at El Paseo del Río Bayamón (Puerto Rico). She is also a co-founder of _SITIO// Espacio y Taller Interdisciplinario de Arte, a community-based and solidarity-driven platform for artists from Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Santos-Negrón has received several awards, including an artist fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (Puerto Rico) for Campechada 2023; a travel fellowship from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture for the Museum Association of the Caribbean’s Conference (Washington D.C., The Bahamas); a CERF+ artist fellowship (Vermont); the 2019 BORIMIX award (New York) for the Valor y Cambio social currency project; and the Merit Scholarship from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
She is also a professor of visual arts, an independent curator, and the director of the Museo de Arte de Bayamón in Puerto Rico.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My art practice seeks to preserve the experience and memory of the social, political, and ecological territories of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean through the exploration and study of the landscape. I use drawing, photography, sculpture, and installation to develop projects that are primarily nourished by field expeditions and research in direct contact with nature. The work is created using found resources such as organic materials, high-consumption industrial supplies, paper, photographs, sound, and mixed media, among others. Through this, I aim to highlight the ongoing interaction between human activity and the natural world, framing my daily experiences as part of a hybrid and toxic social narrative. I explore how contemporary landscapes—physical, cultural, and conceptual—are shaped by the forces of colonialism, migration, climate change, and privatization policies. My work also addresses cultural memory, investigating how collective histories and social realities intertwine with the landscapes inhabited by communities. By making visible the tensions and transformations of the environments of the Puerto Rican archipelago and the Caribbean, my practice raises questions about the power dynamics that continue to shape this region, as part of the social construction of the contemporary landscape.