With more than 100 works—including sculptures, installations, archaefacts, photographs, and a documentary—multifaceted artist Nick Quijano presents his latest creative work, BASURA, at the Museo de Las Américas.

BASURA brings together Quijano's work of more than 30 years rescuing discarded urban objects and transforming them into art, making this new presentation by the renowned artist an anthology of one of the subjects he is most passionate about.

“This exhibition,” the artist said, “is a reflection on the impact of humankind on the planet and a celebration of art as a testament to that impact. Hence, this project is accompanied by a series of eight lectures featuring humanists, artists, writers, and environmentalists to analyze the topic.”

Since 1981, Quijano has visited Cascajo Beach in the La Perla neighborhood of Old San Juan to collect discarded objects deposited there by the sea. With these materials, which vary in shape, size, texture, and color, the artist has assembled an astonishing repertoire of artworks that includes sculptures, assemblages, models, reliefs, landscapes, portraits, installations, and "artifactographies" (photographs taken with these objects). "The materials I've been using have acquired strange, unique, and astonishing qualities through the work of humans and the forces of nature.

In this exhibition, visitors will confront their own daily lives by recognizing in the materials I use something that was an important part of their lives and which, perhaps, will make them question why they have discarded them," the artist emphasized.

For his part, art critic Rafael Jackson-Martin has said of this exhibition that Quijano “reveals something that society prefers to keep hidden, accumulated in suburban landfills or buried in the depths of the sea where it ended up. This stellar reappearance of trash serves to offer the artist a way out of the crisis of progress in our (post)industrial civilization: if the consumption of merchandise denies the future in an inoperative present, Quijano offers trash as a way to reactivate that future through the work and grace of recycling.”

The documentary "Basura: (with a colon)" by renowned filmmaker Roberto "Tito" Otero will be presented on opening night. The exhibition will be on display in Gallery 2 of the Museo de las Américas until February 24, 2013. The conference and forum program will run from December through February 24, 2013.

On display until July 28, 2013.