Newport Art Museum Presents Angel Otero: The Ocean Forgot Your Garden

Angel Otero, The Sea, 2023 / 2026, oil paint and fabric collaged on canvas, 96 x 144 in. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Vito Schnabel Gallery.

Newport Art Museum Presents Angel Otero: The Ocean Forgot Your Garden
Newport, RI — Newport Art Museum is pleased to present Angel Otero: The Ocean Forgot Your Garden, a major two-site exhibition spanning the Drury and Library Galleries of the Griswold House and the Morris Gallery of the Cushing Memorial Building. Bringing together works from early stages in his career, alongside recently completed paintings, the exhibition examines how personal histories persist through fragments, revisions, and acts of reconstruction. The exhibition opens on Friday evening, July 10, as part of Newport Art Museum’s Summer Art Party  and opens to the public on Saturday, July 11.

Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, and working between Puerto Rico and New York, Otero is widely recognized for his distinctive approach to painting. Layering oil paint onto sheets of glass, allowing it to partially dry, and then peeling it away into flexible “skins,” he transfers and recomposes these fragments onto canvas. The resulting surfaces exist between abstraction and representation, carrying visible traces of time, gesture, and revision.

“Angel Otero’s work is rooted in a profound understanding of painting’s traditions while radically reimagining how a painting is actually made,” said Harry Philbrick, Executive Director of Newport Art Museum. “Drawing from personal memory, domestic space, and the history of painting itself, he creates works that feel both intimate and expansive. These paintings reveal how images are continually transformed through time and experience, and through his singular painting technique.”

Across both buildings, the exhibition explores Otero’s sustained engagement with place and history. Doors, windows, pianos, dressers, and other familiar forms emerge and dissolve within richly layered compositions, suggesting that memory is never fixed but continually reshaped through experience. Throughout the exhibition, the ocean serves as both a visual presence and a metaphor for movement, distance, loss, and return, connecting experiences of Puerto Rico and Newport through a shared language of water, migration, memory, and exchange.

“What interested me about bringing these works to Newport was the opportunity to think about two places connected by the ocean but shaped by very different histories. Growing up in Puerto Rico, I’ve always been aware of how the sea carries stories of migration, commerce, colonialism, and cultural exchange. As I worked on this exhibition, I began thinking about Newport’s own maritime history and how both places have long been shaped by the movement of people, goods, and ideas across the Atlantic,” said Otero. “In both places, the ocean was never simply the edge of life. It was the road connecting them to the world. That became a way of thinking about memory itself, how histories, like the sea, continue to surface, shift, and transform over time.”

Installed within the historic rooms of the Griswold House are seven paintings from Otero’s Poussin Series, a body of work inspired by the seventeenth-century French painter Nicolas Poussin. Rather than reproducing Poussin’s compositions, Otero fragments, transfers, and reconstructs them through his distinctive process, allowing images from the past to emerge and dissolve within layered surfaces of paint. These works extend the exhibition’s broader consideration of time and transformation, proposing art history itself as a living continuum in which images are continually reimagined across generations.

Angel Otero: The Ocean Forgot Your Garden was organized by Danielle Ogden, Artistic Director of Newport Art Museum, in collaboration with Angel Otero and Mekhrangiz Mukhtorova.

Newport Art Museum gratefully acknowledges the contributions of Vito Schnabel, Madeline Sparer, Bob Colacello, and Jeff Foye. Special thanks to Brendan & Tessa O’Donnell, Marie & William Samuels, and members of the Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Exhibition Fund, whose generosity and longstanding commitment to the Museum have helped make The Ocean Forgot Your Garden possible.

Click HERE for more images from the Exhibition.

About Angel Otero
Angel Otero’s work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and internationally, including presentations at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico.

Recent exhibitions include The Ocean in My Room at Vito Schnabel Gallery, St. Moritz, in 2023. In May 2026, Otero completed a residency at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, culminating in the exhibition Agua Salada, his first major exhibition in the United Kingdom, which further explored themes of memory, family, place, and the ocean as a site of reflection and transformation. The exhibition is on view until October.

About Newport Art Museum
Founded in 1912, the Newport Art Museum is one of the oldest continuously operating art museums and schools of its kind in the country, engaging diverse audiences through exhibitions, education, and programs that celebrate the visual arts of Newport, New England, and beyond. Located on historic Bellevue Avenue, the Museum’s campus includes the landmark John N.A. Griswold House, a National Historic Landmark designed by Richard Morris Hunt. For more information, visit newportartmuseum.org.