Shifting Landscapes | Media
Nov 1, 2024–Jan 25, 2026
Shifting Landscapes | Media
Playlist
Chelsey Pellot, Assistant Manager of Foundation & Government Relations, writes about the perfect soundtrack for Shifting Landscapes.
With its themes of cultural resistance, reclamation, and preservation, Bad Bunny’s 2025 album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, is the perfect soundtrack to Shifting Landscapes. Song by song, it directly overlaps with the exhibition’s core issues, offering a unique sonar and visual experience when paired together.
The album’s opening track, NUEVAYoL, pays homage to New York City’s influence on Puerto Rican culture, a history explored in Shifting Landscapes’s New York Cityscapes section, which features Nuyorican artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Miguel Luciano, Hiram Maristany, Sophie Rivera, and Rigoberto Torres. These artists demonstrate that the influence goes both ways—Puerto Rico has had an immense impact on how we experience the Big Apple or la gran manzana.
The song LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii draws parallels between Hawai’i and Puerto Rico’s complex relationships to the United States. It provides a somber soundtrack to Piliāmo‘o’s photographs depicting how the multiyear construction of the H-3 Interstate in O‘ahu, initiated by the U.S. government, impacted local communities.
PERFuMITO NUEVO captures the essence of the other-worldly figure portrayed in Dalton Gata’s painting I Don’t Need You To Be Warm with its ethereal sound and dreamlike lyrics. Wearing a billowing furry coat, shiny black stiletto boots, and a crown of fire atop flowing blond hair, “The figure in Gata’s painting fashions a sense of self-confidence that is alluring,” the exhibition’s curator, Marcela Guerrero, observes. “She might very well be who Bad Bunny is singing about when he says ‘No parece leo ni escorpio; Pa mí que ella tiene su propio signo; Fría, sentimental, está en temporada de portarse mal.’” (“She doesn’t look like a Leo or Scorpio; I think she has her own sign; cold, sentimental, she’s in the season of misbehaving.”) The exploration of evolving political, ecological, and social issues, and how artists portray the world around them, is the crux of Shifting Landscapes, and mirrors Bad Bunny's similar inspirations and motivations behind his powerful work of art, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.