Echoes of Survival emerges from the turbulent currents of colonial history, migration, and resistance that have shaped the Dominican Republic. At the center, a stoic figure clutches a child, surrounded by fragmented bodies, fish, tools, and abstract symbols. Each element speaks of hardship and adaptation—fishing as survival, dismembered limbs as cultural dislocation, and toys scattered like memories lost or preserved through generations.
The composition’s density suggests a collective memory that refuses to be forgotten. It invokes ancestral labor, spiritual endurance, and the blurred boundary between personal and communal histories.
Fish float among the bodies—not just as food, but as cultural metaphors of sustenance and movement. Children’s toys carved at the bottom—symbols of innocence—contrast with the muscular, weary adults, anchoring the piece in both hope and consequence.
Mateo Figueroa Peña was a self-taught sculptor from the lush foothills of San Cristóbal. Orphaned young and raised by his grandfather, a former sugarcane laborer and griot, Mateo began carving river stones and driftwood before turning to mahogany salvaged from hurricane-felled trees.
Deeply influenced by Afro-Caribbean oral traditions and the syncretic spirituality of the island, Mateo’s work became known for its layered symbolism and communal storytelling. He never traveled outside Hispaniola but participated in numerous rural art festivals, where his pieces stirred dialogue around cultural memory, colonial trauma, and working-class dignity.
Born in 1952, San Cristóbal – Dominican Republic
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