@ Riverside Art Museum
EXHIBITION ON VIEW: March 22 – September 28, 2025
Location: Powell and DeVean Galleries (Second floor)
The sigh of history rises over ruins, not over landscapes. . . . 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 — like photography — 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 World War II economic boom and the Cold War, a period known as “the American Century,” Cedré uncovers layers of history to reveal 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.
Curated by Dr. Catherine Gudis
This exhibition was made possible in part by Pitzer College.
Special thanks to Adrian Metoyer, St. Mark’s Missionary Baptist Church, A People’s History of the I.E., The Carrillo Family, Dr. Hilda Lloréns, Tarrah Krajnak, Cindy Hernández, Pablo Delano, Jose Caraballo Pagán / ENLACE, Myra Cedré, and Leslie Nieves.
Images above: Cedré, Sold Parcela in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, 2018, Church Doors Opening Out to Warehouses, St. Mark’s Missionary Baptist Church, San Bernardino (from Live from the Frontline: Valley Truck Farms), 2024 and Warehouses behind Vera’s House (from Live from the Frontline: Valley Truck Farms), 2024. Courtesy of Tamara Cedré.
