Stone Yucayeque: Old San Juan’s 500-Year History on Display at The Clemente

The Clemente's current group exhibition, Stone Yucayeque (El Yucayeque de Piedra), includes the works of twenty-eight artists that tell a complicated, yet enthralling story of an iconic and historic place in Borinquen (Puerto Rico): the city of Old San Juan. 

The exhibition recognizes the 500 years since the fortified stone city's founding in 1521 by Spanish colonizers and pays homage to the Taínos by using a word from their language, Yucayeque, which means village or city. With work by Puerto Ricans and non-Puerto Rican artists alike, this exhibition is nostalgic, romantic, and, most importantly, political, conveying the complex history of the archipelago of Puerto Rico. Old San Juan is the oldest continuously inhabited post-European contact settlement under US jurisdiction, the second oldest in the entire Western Hemisphere, and located in the oldest colony in the world. As such, the exhibition acknowledges both its current and past history, its place in the land of the Tainos, its culture and people, and the enslaved Africans who built this fortified city.