A Collection of Puerto Rican Life.

• Author: Stoddart, Veronica Gould
• Position: Smithsonian Institution's National Musuem of American History, Washington, D.C. - Brief Article

If objects could speak, what a stow they would tell in the exhibition A Collector's Vision of Puerto Rico, on view through January 1999 at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. Expressive carved religious images, scary carnival masks, crude musical instruments and toys, women's and men's grooming implements, and common farming tools all offer eloquent testimony to the everyday life of the Puerto Rican people during the past three hundred years.

Planned to coincide with the exhibition is the Smithsonian's Encuentros series, free public programs that reflect the rich and diverse history of Latino communities in the U.S. The series includes theater and musical presentations, as well as the Puerto Rican Cuatro Festival with Homage to Yomo Toro, and a scholarly conference on the legacy of 1898 for the island communities of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, the Philippines, and American Samoa.

A Collector's Vision of Puerto Rico, drawn from the thirty-two hundred pieces donated to the museum by Teodoro Vidal, offers an unprecedented look at the cultural history of Puerto Rico through the eyes of one of its most prominent collectors. The Vidal Collection is the largest donation ever by a single collector to the museum. Some sixty paintings and carvings were also donated to the National Museum of American Art and are on view indefinitely.

"Collecting and exhibiting these objects is extremely important because of the lack of representation of Puerto Rican history in museums," says Marvette Perez, head curator of the exhibition.

Vidal, a Puerto Rican businessman and philanthropist who was at one time an aide to the first elected governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Munoz Marin, has been collecting Puerto Rican artifacts for more than four decades. Concerned because native historical, cultural, and artistic pieces were leaving the country and finding their way into foreign...