Contact with Jack Delano
(Cartoon Interjection)³\(\Leftrightarrow \) Ink on tracing paper. Artist Collection. [Not available for sale]
My first contact with Jack Delano did not begin with a photograph.
It began with a drawing.
Among the fragments of Puerto Rican cultural memory that survived in my recollection of drafts, one image kept returning: the “Festival Casals”. A temporary stage glowing under a humid Caribbean sky. The swell of an orchestra dissolving the distance between strangers. Someone always remembered the night slightly differently, but everyone agreed it had happened.
Jack Delano understood that history is rarely preserved through monuments alone. Sometimes it survives in ordinary gestures—like the scrape of a chair as a musician tunes an instrument, people patiently or anxiously waiting on wooden benches, or in a child looking toward the crowd instead of the performers.
Long before I understood documentary photography, I was already noticing his way of seeing the island. His images and Irene’s critical eye never seemed to focus on spectacle. They were interested in attention.
When I look at my own sketch interjection, based on a Delano’s cartoon, I see that attitude in action. On one side of the page, the public memory unfolds: the festival banner, the orchestra, the gathered crowd. But on the other, a private memory takes over. A solitary figure approaches a woman just as she emerges from a dark threshold (or Einstein-Rosen bridge. Why not?). It is a quiet, unexpected collision from my days between 2015 and 2016, traveling back in time to The Puerto Rico observed through Irene and Jac's lenses.
[That is why you need to teach your own children to love how to build questions and use the right tools for them to understand and document reality as a concept for their existence or otherwise someone else will do it for them.]
Revisiting the work makes me realize that my own practice inherited everything from that tension. I became less interested in merely illustrating Puerto Rico than in observing the invisible choreography between people and place—the structures, rituals, and passing glances that quietly sustain memory. As a hyperconscious native individual who grew up stealing books— I mean, poetically borrowing them— I’m proud to confess that Jack Delano and Irene should be respected for their anthropological observations.
This sketch intersection of mine isn’t an attempt to recreate one of Delano’s portraits of Puerto Rico’s geopolitical landscape.
It’s a conversation with them.
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A creative, non-magical realism gift to myself.
Happy Birthday, Grace!
You won your 34th Marathon orbiting around the sun. I am finally proud of respecting what you’ve accomplished so far. Wujuuu!
Godspeed, my dear. May your days be filled with joy, intentional healthy masochism, and a hell of a lot of money—because more than you deserving it, you fucking earned it… and without anyone else's permission. Go claim your prizes, girl.
You got this!
Best,
Your guts and inner voice.
© [(1992)(2026)+(Present)x(Future)] Grace S. Matos García / Grace Portal/ graceportal.art Images, writing, and editing held with care. All rights reserved.
