Chemi Rosato Sejo
July 2018
Born in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico, Chemi Rosado-Seijo graduated from the painting department of the Puerto Rico School of Visual Arts in 1997. In 1998, he worked with Michy Marxuach to open a gallery that transformed into a not-for-profit organization presenting resources and exhibitions for contemporary artists in Puerto Rico. In 2000, Rosado had his first solo show at the Joan Miro Foundation in Barcelona, including interventions on billboards around the city. Since 2002, he has worked with residents of the El Cerro community, a poor neighborhood south of San Juan, to present public art projects, workshops and other community initiatives. In 2006, he inaugurated La Perla’s Bowl, a sculpture built with residents of San Juan’s La Perla community that functions as both a skateboarding ramp and a pool. Since 2009, Rosado-Seijo has been organizing exhibitions in his apartment in Santurce, creating a center for meeting and exchange in the Puerto Rican contemporary art scene. Rosado-Seijo’s work was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2017.
Transcript
[Hip-Hop Music Playing]
CS (0:15): Sports are about rules, faster, slower, better. In skateboarding you have something like Style. Right now that we are here at the ramp, because the ramp is painted white, all these markings we have been doing unconsciously come from the dirt of skateboarding. When we take these panels out and put them on the wall as a drawing, they’re really beautiful and also conceptually they are these drawings made like Jackson Pollock that were flat or horizontal and now are vertical on the wall.
[Hip-Hop Music Playing]
CS (0:55): My name is Chemi Rosado-Seiijo. I’m a socially-engaged artist living and working in Puerto Rico, and also a skateboarder.
CS (1:10): They have tried to stop skateboarding ridiculously in California, for example, in New York, here, it’s just impossible. It’s the only natural thing that modernism has brought into it. If you have concrete all over the place, you need skateboarding.
CS (1:42): I definitely come from the fact that I’m a Puerto-Rican using this influence that comes from the United States of America. Like, you’ve seen the weapons of the enemy and then shot it back to them. That’s the postcolonial modernist way of painting and drawing – from the colony, of course. From THE colony (Laughs).
[Music continues playing over credits]
