Whitney Museum of American Art

Catalog design for the special translated edition of the exhibition, no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria. Curated by Marcela Guerrero and organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, this was the first scholarly exhibition centered on Puerto Rican art by a major U.S. museum in nearly half a century.

Taking its title from a verse by Puerto Rican poet Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, the exhibition coincided with the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria. It explores how a multigenerational group of over fifteen artists from Puerto Rico and the diaspora responded to the storm and the compounded crises that followed. The exhibition is defined by a broader context of existential threats: the austerity measures of the PROMESA Act, the tragic loss of 4,645 lives, the Verano del 19 protests, consecutive earthquakes, and the pandemic. The catalogue serves as a platform to document how these artists have forged paths in the wake of these legacies.

For this special edition, the physical book needed to carry the emotional weight of the exhibition; materiality plays a fundamental narrative role. To create an intimate object with a substantial physical presence, the format was reduced while the content was expanded to 224 pages. On the cover, the hurricane and title are rendered in a blind emboss on textured paper—a symbolic gesture that goes beyond aesthetics to evoke memory, invisibility, and the trace of what remains. This exterior is complemented by a Swiss binding with an exposed spine sewn with striking red thread. Inside, two distinct paper stocks are utilized to carefully differentiate the scholarly text sections from the artwork plates.