Puerto Rican artist Rafael Ferrer dies at 93: from jazz drums to the sculptures that shook the art world

Contemporary art has lost one of its most distinctive voices: Rafael Ferrer, the Puerto Rican artist born in San Juan in 1933, has died at the age of 93. The news was confirmed on Tuesday (September 30) by New York’s El Museo del Barrio in an Instagram post, which remembered the artist “for his extraordinary creativity and lasting contribution to contemporary art”, as Artnet News reports.

Before becoming a visual artist, Ferrer was an Afro-Caribbean jazz drummer in New York bands of the 1950s. A trip to Paris in 1954 brought him into the circle of the Surrealists — there he met André Breton and befriended the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam — while he studied painting under the exiled Spanish Surrealist Eugenio Fernández Granell at the University of Puerto Rico. Instinct and improvisation, inherited from music, became the guiding thread of his entire body of work.

His name became internationally known through two guerrilla works: Three Leaf Pieces (1968), when he dumped a truckload of leaves in three Manhattan galleries, and 50 Cakes of Ice (1970), when he left 300-pound blocks of ice to melt in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). “It’s about something appearing where it doesn’t belong”, he used to say.

After major exhibitions in the early 1970s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum, Ferrer returned to figurative painting and in the 1980s began painting the culture of the tropics in vivid colors. He also built large public installations, such as Puerto Rican Sun (1979), a 25-foot arch in the South Bronx, and El Gran Teatro de la Luna (1981) in Philadelphia.

A retrospective in 2010 at El Museo del Barrio brought his work back into the spotlight. Ferrer taught at the University of Pennsylvania, at Skowhegan and at the School of Visual Arts, won a Pew Fellowship in 1993 and the Annalee and Barnett Newman Foundation grant in 2011. He spent his final years between Greenport on Long Island and Vieques in Puerto Rico, experimenting with drawings on blackboards, collages and portraits of the musicians he had played with in the 1950s.