Jorge González is a 2020-2022 Jane Lombard Fellow, nominated by Michelle Marxuach for his project Escuela de Oficios for the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice Prize and is part of the Vera List Center’s As for Protocols cycle of programs. González is an artist whose practice is based on the study of botany, archival procedures, oral history, and tropical modernist architecture. He uses his art as a platform to restore symbols and concepts of Boricua (Puerto Rican) material culture, for the purpose of creating more inclusive narratives between the indigenous and the modern. 

Escuela de Oficios creates a space dedicated to documenting and producing quotidian and academic knowledge of Boricua practices and history. The pedagogical approach is one of self-management with a focus on convivial and communal forms of production. The school’s programming includes conversations, workshops, and exhibitions in which participants engage in mapping, documenting, and practicing artisan techniques. The school aims to recover practices and techniques that were lost to colonization by putting them to practical use. 

“Weaving information and stories, facilitating communal sharing of cultural belongings, learning and doing… Escuela de Oficio takes on a life of its own in the bodies that participate within it.”
Michelle Marxuach, Jane Lombard Prize Council