SFMOMA, Part 16: Floor 2, 1900 to Now. Alegoría de una obsesión (Allegory of an Obsession) (Daniel Lind-Ramos, 2022–23).
Read the material list before you look at the object. Wood frame, wheelbarrow, wood and metal buckets, mop, shoes, burlap and synthetic textiles, burlap sacks, latex gloves, vinyl bag, plastic bucket, metal paint bucket, metal funnel, plastic bottles, metal and rubber wheels, acrylic sheet, acrylic paint, pigment, PVC tube, wire, metal fasteners, and tape. That is not a medium. That is a janitor's closet, assembled into the shape of an altar. Daniel Lind-Ramos took the entire inventory of sanitation labor — every mop and bucket and rubber glove of the pandemic years — and built it into a figure. The figure is La Loca, the Madwoman, who walks the streets of his hometown in Puerto Rico every July with a broom, sweeping porches and demanding payment, half saint and half joke. During COVID, the whole world became La Loca: scrubbing, bleaching, wiping down groceries, washing hands until they cracked. The obsession in the title is ours.
The sculpture is assembled from objects used for sanitation, in an altar-like form evoking the traditional character of La Loca (the Madwoman) from the Fiestas de Santiago Apóstol in Lind-Ramos's hometown of Loíza, Puerto Rico. During her performance, La Loca conducts an exaggerated cleansing with her broom — an action the artist connects to the collective, all-consuming obsession with hygiene at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak. The work was made for his 2023 MoMA PS1 survey, El Viejo Griot, and SFMOMA acquired it in 2024. It is new to the collection, on Floor 2, and it is one of the few places in the museum where the pandemic is treated not as a news event but as a spiritual one.
Lind-Ramos was sixty-nine when he made it. He was seventy when PS1 gave him his largest museum exhibition. He got the MacArthur at sixty-eight. This is the part of the story that should embarrass the art world: Daniel Lind-Ramos was not "discovered." He was a trained painter — University of Puerto Rico, NYU, Paris, university teacher for decades — working continuously in Loíza, the coastal town founded by enslaved Yoruba people, winning European prizes in the 1990s, while the American museum system simply wasn't looking. Then the 2019 Whitney Biennial: his Maria-Maria (2019) — the Virgin Mary as Hurricane Maria, built from wood, beads, coconuts, and a blue FEMA tarp — and four critics called him the breakout star in the same week. Holland Cotter wrote that the piece "reassert[ed] the power of spirituality." He was sixty-six. The loop, if you want one: as a boy he wore the mask of "El Viejo" in the festival; as an old man he makes masked gods out of garbage.
To take care of objects is to take care of memory
That's Lind-Ramos, in 2023: "To take care of objects is to take care of memory." It is the thesis of his entire practice, and Alegoría is the thesis at its most literal. Every object in the sculpture is a memory with a handle: the mop remembers someone's hands, the bucket remembers a floor, the latex glove remembers a fear. He doesn't buy materials. Neighbors give them to him. A piece of siding from his own house, caught in Hurricane Maria's wind, went into an earlier work. The assemblages are archives of a community's refuse — except the community is still there, still handing him things.
His method, in his own words: "I start with an idea based on an experience, and then there are objects that relate to that experience… Maybe I have one object that generates everything, but I don't have the others. I make a drawing or a sketch. Then something happens. Objects start coming. I start finding them. I start making them."
The experience behind Alegoría is documented and specific. When the pandemic hit, Lind-Ramos was stranded in an East Harlem rental after his March 2020 gallery debut, listening to the sirens, as scared as everyone else. His two daughters were frontline nurses. In that apartment he developed what he called an early obsession with cleaning supplies — Clorox, specifically. The sketches from the lockdown became the pandemic works. "Is this the end of human beings?" he said later. "A lot of people were dying. They didn't have time to bury them separately. It's interesting because nobody talks about that now. They say you forget — but I don't forget."
La Loca gave him the form for the feeling. The real La Loca — documented by anthropologists since the 1950s — is a man dressed as a woman, face blackened, in clashing colors and a nightgown, sweeping the streets with a makeshift broom and harassing festivalgoers, delighted in disgust. She is the festival's licensed maniac, the one who cleans too much, wants too much, performs the town's anxieties about dirt and order in public. Lind-Ramos saw the world's pandemic behavior and recognized her. We were all La Loca for two years, bleaching our groceries. The sculpture is the moment the folk character and the global event snap together.
The political and the spiritual
The most important thing written about Lind-Ramos is Holland Cotter's 2023 New York Times review of the PS1 show, and its key paragraph names the critical split outright: "In a reversal of earlier critical takes on Lind-Ramos' art, the tendency now seems to be to view it insistently as 'political,' which, of course, it is, and to avoid, even disparage, the idea of calling it 'spiritual,' which it also is. We've come to think of these descriptions as somehow mutually exclusive, but they aren't in the culture that Lind-Ramos is so assiduously recording."
This is the thing the museum label can't quite say, though it tries: the altar form is not a metaphor. In Loíza — the town with Puerto Rico's largest Black population, where West African traditions survived the Middle Passage — assemblage altars are a sculptural genre, continuous with minkisi, with Santería shrines, with the domestic altars in people's homes. Lind-Ramos's "guardian-like figures" are spiritually activated objects in a tradition older than the gallery system. The COVID reading (mops as memorial) and the spiritual reading (altar as altar) are the same reading. "In our communities we find healing in solidarity," he said after Hurricane Maria. "After Maria we did not wait for the [United States] government to help us; we decided to help ourselves with what we had." The sculpture is made of what they had. That was always the point.
On the same floor, a few galleries away, hangs Thornton Dial's Valley Creek Disaster Area — tin and chicken wire, a flooded Black neighborhood in Alabama, 2004. Two generations of the same tradition: catastrophe rendered in refuse, the scrapyard as archive, the assemblage as witness. Dial broke through at sixty-five; Lind-Ramos at sixty-six. The museum didn't plan the rhyme, or maybe it did. Either way: stand between them and you can feel the lineage, Alabama to Loíza, flood to pandemic, one continuous argument that the materials of survival are the materials of art.
So here's the thesis: Alegoría de una obsesión is a pandemic memorial that refuses the language of memorials. No names, no dates, no candlelight vigil — just a wheelbarrow and a mop and a pile of rubber gloves, stacked into the shape of a madwoman with a broom, which is to say into the shape of all of us in 2020. Lind-Ramos's great subject is how a community holds itself together with what it has. The objects are the evidence. The altar is the argument. And the obsession — the bleaching, the scrubbing, the fear — turns out, in his hands, to have been a form of care all along. To take care of objects is to take care of memory. To take care of memory is to refuse to forget. "They say you forget — but I don't forget." 🌁
Timeline — Daniel Lind-Ramos
1953 — born in Loíza, Puerto Rico
1975 — painting, University of Puerto Rico; 1980 — master's, NYU; studies in Paris
1990s–2010s — painter and teacher, University of Puerto Rico at Humacao; European prizes
2019 — Maria-Maria at the Whitney Biennial; "breakout star" at sixty-six
2020 — stranded in East Harlem during lockdown; daughters on the front lines; the Clorox sketches
2021 — MacArthur Fellowship, age sixty-eight
2023 — El Viejo Griot, MoMA PS1; makes Alegoría de una obsesión for the show
2024 — SFMOMA acquires Alegoría de una obsesión