Radamés Juni Figueroa is a Puerto Rican artist who works in painting, sculpture, installation, and streetwear design. He also organizes performances and happenings for which he curates the environment, often in collaboration with fellow artists and musicians, and featuring sculptural hand-built fountains spouting piña colada. He’s known for his playful juxtapositions of art historical reverence and quotidian Puerto Rican iconography, using humor to explore the conflicting meanings “high culture” has in the complicated context of a modern-day tropical colony. Figueroa’s work is very often hilarious, sometimes self-effacingly ironic, but darker truths of personal and political resonance tend to lie below the surface.

Figueroa’s practice can be almost guerrilla-like in its spontaneous injection of radically joyful acts in unexpected places, like when he worked with residents of the Puerto Rican neighborhood of La Perla to paint the roofs of their houses in safari animal prints. La Perla is a poor urban area with a long history of oppression and neglect, and Figueroa’s art provided residents with a beautifully simple– and funny–  means of protest. Another iconic example of Figueroa’s practice is when he requested and received permission from the Castello di Rivoli museum to use iconic films from their collection in an original installation, and proceeded to exhibit films by Marina Abramovich and Joseph Beuys set to a custom Reggaetón playlist, in a makeshift Puerto Rican beach kiosk within an Italian art fair. He lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico.