Adál Maldonado, an influential Puerto Rican photographer and artistic provocateur who explored the psychological and cultural fallout of the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York, died on Dec. 9 in San Juan. His death, in a hospital, was caused by pancreatic cancer, said Francisco Rovira Rullán, his gallerist in San Juan and the manager of his estate. Mr. Maldonado had moved back to Puerto Rico in 2010. When he was a teenager, he moved with his family from their home in the mountainous Puerto Rican countryside to New Jersey and then to the urban cacophony of the Bronx. The experience left him with a sense of displacement that would be the driving theme of his art and make him a quintessential “Nuyorican” — one who straddles New York and Puerto Rico and feels entirely at home in neither.

Source: New York Times January 02, 2021 15:45 UTC