The Visions of Proteus: Ferré and Martorell at Calle Cristina

The summer of 1961 marks a before and after in the artistic career of maestro Antonio Martorell. It is then that he meets Don Luis A. Ferré for the first time, whom he finds with “hammer and nail in hand” installing a work in the recently inaugurated Museo de Arte de Ponce at 70 Calle Cristina, the original location of the Museum and today of the Centro Cultural de Ponce Carmen Solá de Pereira. Ferré immediately recognizes the potential of the budding artist and in a gesture of generosity that boostshis career, awards him a scholarship to study in Madrid for a year.

This story, which intertwines the lives of two giants of the Puerto Rican cultural scene, begins a new chapter thirty years later in 1991, when a series of encounters between the two began thatgave life to The Visions of Proteus, a monumental effigy presented to the public for the first time in 1992. In this polyptych, one of his first major pictorial projects, the maestro immortalizes his patron.

Six decades after that first meeting, the Museo de Arte de Ponce and the Centro Cultural de Ponce Carmen Solá de Pereira celebrate the 119th anniversary of the birth of Don Luis A. Ferré with the exhibition The Visions of Proteus: Ferré and Martorell at Calle Cristina, an event that also commemorates the first important collaboration between the two Ponce institutions.