To Rise Above Ruins
RIVERSIDE ART MUSEUM
On View: March 15, 2025 – August 31, 2025
“The sigh of history rises over ruins…Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean—it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of history dissolves…but, poetry conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present.”
—Derek Walcott
To Rise Above Ruins takes inspiration from Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, who ruminates on how cultures persist under the threat of erasure and how the process of poetry can be one of excavation and self-discovery to reclaim and heal historical wounds.
Artist Tamara Cedré builds her work upon this notion by creating a visual dialogue between archival materials (advertisements, historical photographs, news articles, family scrapbooks) and her own photographic responses. Looking closely at imagery produced in the era of WWII economic boom and the Cold War, a period coined “the American Century,” Cedré uncovers layers of history to help us see how land has been used and shaped in the service of power. This exhibition engages past and present to create a photographic commons for Cedré and the communities she calls home in Puerto Rico and Southern California, questioning legacies of empire at a critical moment in our country’s history.
