“I am making machines into humans,” Ferrer remarked on the occasion of his solo exhibition at the Pan American Union in 1966. “If my work seems funny, why, a sense of humor is essential in so terrible a world.” The exhibition marked the culmination of his welded sculptures, evolved in the early 1960s out of earlier experiments in assemblage using found objects and industrial debris. Developed while Ferrer traveled frequently between San Juan and New York, these objects were exhibited—to a combination of public outcry and grudging respect—in San Juan at the Universidad de Puerto Rico (1964), La Casa del Arte (1965), and the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña (1966) before traveling to Washington, D.C. The exhibition opened months before Ferrer settled permanently on the mainland and began to develop his work in the direction of “actions” and process-oriented installations.“A green-and-red thi[n]g-amajig,” in the words of the Washington Post critic, Head exemplifies the colorful welded sculptures that Ferrer made during this time. Perched atop a red base encircled by a heavy chain, the whimsical, welded-metal “head” satirizes the mechanization of modern life, its green machine parts inanimate yet playfully anthropomorphic. Ferrer’s sculptures are “primarily adaptations of machinery to human form: typewriters and adding machines have been endowed with poetic wit and charm,” José Gómez Sicre wrote in the exhibition brochure. “They represent, however, a criticism of the mechanized attitudes assumed by human beings under the impact of an increasingly mechanical civilization.” Conversant with contemporary works by David Smith, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Chamberlain, Head distills the crux of sculpture in the 1960s as it turned from traditional figuration to new and repurposed materials, process, and color.
Rafael Ferrer was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico to a wealthy family. He attended Staunton Military Academy in Virginia from 1947 to 1951, where he learned to play the drums and was first exposed to jazz. At Syracuse University from 1951 to 1953, he formed the Rafi Ferrer Group, which played Afro-Cuban jazz, and began to paint on his own. Ferrer returned to San Juan in 1953 and enrolled at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, where he studied with the Spanish Surrealist Eugenio Fernández Granell. In 1954 he traveled across Europe, coming into contact with Wifredo Lam. He moved between New York and San Juan over the following decade, working as a musician and continuing to paint. Two early exhibitions at the University of Puerto Rico, Dos pintores (with Rafael Villamil, 1961) and Ferrer esculturas (1964), demonstrated the increasingly three-dimensional evolution of his work, which began to incorporate industrial remnants and found objects. Ferrer settled permanently on the mainland in 1966, teaching at the Philadelphia College of Art and traveling frequently to New York, where he met Robert Morris. He executed a number of conceptual actions during this period, notably Three Leaf Pieces (1968), in which bushels of leaves brought from Pennsylvania were deposited at sites in Manhattan, including Leo Castelli’s warehouse; and Deflected Fountain, for Marcel Duchamp (1970), for which he diverted the spray of an outdoor fountain at set times, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Ferrer held a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1971) and installed a site-specific work, Isla (1974), at the Museum of Modern Art. He received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1972, 1975, 1989) and the Guggenheim Foundation (1978). Since turning to large-scale, neo-expressionist painting in the early 1980s, Ferrer has portrayed myriad female subjects and landscapes, his work linked to New Image Painting and to currents in Latino art. El Museo del Barrio organized a retrospective of his work, Retro/Active: The Work of Rafael Ferrer, in 2010.
