Raising a cup to art
344 unique mugs make up artist’s striking installation at SAMA
“Adjie Gilas,” an installation tucked into a corner of the Cowden Gallery of the San Antonio Museum of Art, includes 344 aluminum mugs — each with its designated spot.
Installing the work created by Indo-surinamese artist Dhiradj Ramsamoedj required close attention to a diagram provided to the museum’s staff. The aluminum mugs are arranged on narrow slats in a specific pattern.
The title of the piece translates to “Grandmother’s Cup.” It is intended as an homage to Ramsamoedj’s grandmother.
The simple but powerful work is among the many striking pieces in “No Ocean Between Us: Art of Asian Diasporas in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1945-Present,” which originated at the Art Museum of the Americas of the Organization of American States in Washington, D.C. It is on view through May 9.
“The placement of the mugs is important because it echoes the floor plan of his grandmother’s house, and the wooden slats are a riff on the shelves in her house,” said Lucia Abramovich Sánchez, associate curator of Latin American Art at SAMA, during a media preview of the exhibit. “So there was a lot of TLC, a lot of care taken into how this was put together and displayed.”
The exhibitions team that assembled the piece got to see an element of it that is hidden from museum visitors. The mugs all are stamped with an “R,” Ramsamoedj’s grandmother’s initial, on the back.
Screenprints of his grandmother’s face are on all of the mugs. On some, she’s seen in profile; on others, she’s seen facing front.
“Each one is unique,” Sánchez said.
The mugs also vary in size and appearance, with a few appearing more worn than others.
“I associate these old types of mugs or cups with because she always drinks out of these types of cups,” Ramsamoedj wrote in a blog about the first showing of the work, which was in his grandmother’s home as part of an exhibit of contemporary art.
He originally planned to hang the mugs from the ceiling, he wrote, but decided that didn’t really make sense.
“Why hang the cups from the ceiling?,” he wrote. “Slats on the walls were used to put small items on. These cups as well were placed on them. That is why I choose to place the cups on these slats instead of hanging them from the ceiling.”