Ponce in Chicago: El Carnaval Ponceño

Opened: April 2013

With Ponce in Chicago, PRAA continued to explore Puerto Rico’s regional traditions, this time highlighting the island’s most historic and grand carnival. Dating back to 1858, the Carnaval Ponceño was presented through a collection of striking photographs and authentic vejigante masks and costumes by artisan Kenneth Meléndez. The exhibition captured the spectacle of Ponce’s streets during carnival season—filled with parades, coronations, the symbolic reign of King Momo, and rituals such as the burial of the sardine and the burning of “Juá.”

The curatorial narrative situated Ponce as a cosmopolitan cultural capital whose carnival functions as a public stage for satire, devotion, and civic pride. Labels and wall texts unpacked the deep roots of mask-making and procession in the city, noting the papier-mâché techniques, elaborate horns, and chromatic bravado of Ponce’s iconic masks. By foregrounding makers and process, the exhibition honored living craftsmanship while contextualizing carnival as a site where communities negotiate power, celebrate survival, and articulate identity.

For Chicago audiences, the installation offered a mirror of diaspora experience: a translocal conversation between the island and the Midwest in which memory travels through images, sounds, and objects. The display design encouraged slow looking—pairing large-format photographs with intimate details of masks and costumes—so visitors could appreciate both the pageantry and the handmade labor behind it. Public-facing interpretation emphasized intergenerational learning, inviting elders and youth to connect their own family stories to the larger history of Ponce’s carnival.

As the second part of PRAA’s “Carnival Trilogy,” this exhibition complemented Loíza in Chicago (2012) and anticipated the northern coastal focus of Hatillo in Chicago (2014).