Art is confrontation, asserts Rick Rubin in The Creative Act: A Way of Being. “Fictional worlds are not just figments of a person’s imagination; they circulate and exist independently of us and can be called up, accessed and explored when needed,” write Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby in Speculative Everything. Dionne Brand, in A Map to the Door of No Return: On Belonging, confirms that “To find our way successfully, it is not enough to have a map. We need a cognitive schema as well as a practical mastery of way-finding.”
Vejigantes—figures in Puerto Rican festivals—are frequent protagonists in multidisciplinary artist Beatriz Amelia Whitehill’s work. Originally, making appearances in Chisme as a cut-out and painted canvas on top of the canvas surrounding the people seated around a table sharing stories, and in Shadows That Speak With Us, lurking in the background and painted on the canvas directly. This work depicts an anonymous figure pointing a gun while vignettes make themselves known in the shadow self of the figure: conquistadors wearing morion helmets in an attacking position and lush fields blazing. Originally, I thought these deviant creatures with horned fangs were framing devices in Whitehill’s work, but her newest pieces indicate they are more than that.
Most recently, Whitehill resurrects vejigantes through papier-mâché. What’s so exciting about this moment in her practice is her experimentation in sculpture; she’s known for her paintings. This timely discourse aligns with Puerto Rico’s status reappearing in the news because of efforts to silence the coquis’ notable hum, Bad Bunny’s declaration, “Seguimo aquí / we are still here” in the music video for DTMF (2025), full of nostalgia of pre-gentrification, and wider-spread acknowledgement of changing landscapes and the underbelly of American imperialism and how natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic especially exposed those fault lines for the island.
Through Whitehill’s papier-mâché vejigantes, she deconstructs and reconstructs mid-20th-century maps of Puerto Rico with sketches of vejigantes and unknown figures and painted flames on the horns, demonstrating an embodied colonial, imperial and folkloric cartographic palimpsest. These fragmentary forms suggest that maps are psychological and not fixed, which is in tension with mapping indigeneity and Blackness. What’s compelling about this collage is that it is formed around a clay mold in the shape of a vejigante. By taking on the form of this beloved and terrifying creature, these maps become a fiction shrouded in layers of (lowercase ‘t’) truth. Maps were a political tool of domination that warps scale and slaps on Spanish names with white supremacist capitalist patriarchy as the ideological adhesive.
Historically, papier-mâché as a folk material is fragile, ephemeral and a signifier of DIY culture. When referring to papier-mâché, the Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research calls the transformation a “(re)birth” and offers a proverbial description: “Initially unwritten, we are shaped by our environment over time.” In Whitehill’s hands, the medium transforms from a tool of domination to one of defiance and ancestral memory. While she is primarily known as a painter, the use of papier-mâché can be read as a departure from “commercial” or “institutional materials” and a shift towards the vernacular, blurring the line between artwork, everyday household object, artifact and performance. Furthermore, the hand-held scale has a conceptual presence of a monument, but instead of a more permanent material, it symbolizes an adaptive or living archive. To call this work an intervention would sanitize its radicality. It’s a confrontation of histories, who is telling what stories and the weight of fact and folklore.
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