Newport Art Museum opens its most significant exhibition of the summer this weekend: Angel Otero: The Ocean Forgot Your Garden, a two-site show bringing together early and recent work by the Puerto Rico-born, New York-based painter across the Griswold House and the Cushing Memorial Building.
The exhibition opens Friday evening, July 10, as part of the museum’s Summer Art Party, and to the general public Saturday, July 11.
Otero is known for an unusual technique: he layers oil paint onto glass, lets it partially dry, peels it away into flexible skins, and transfers and recomposes those fragments onto canvas. The resulting paintings sit between abstraction and representation, their surfaces rich with visible traces of time and revision. Familiar domestic forms — doors, windows, pianos, dressers — emerge and dissolve within the compositions, suggesting memory as something continually reshaped rather than fixed.
The ocean runs through the exhibition as both image and metaphor, connecting Newport and Puerto Rico through shared histories of migration, commerce, and cultural exchange. “In both places, the ocean was never simply the edge of life. It was the road connecting them to the world,” Otero said.
Installed in the historic rooms of the Griswold House are seven paintings from Otero’s Poussin Series, in which he fragments and reconstructs compositions by the 17th-century French painter Nicolas Poussin through his peeling and transfer process.
The exhibition was organized by Danielle Ogden, artistic director of Newport Art Museum, in collaboration with Otero. His work is held in the collections of the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.
Newport Art Museum is at 76 Bellevue Ave. More information at newportartmuseum.org.
