El Schomburg (Espacio de arte interdisciplinario) presents “expand blur collapse,” a video installation by Nayda Collazo-Lloréns that explores the interconnected terrains of memory, language, and place. The exhibition will be on view from March 6 to April 30, 2026, at El Schomburg, located at 2538 West Division Street, Humboldt Park, Chicago, Illinois. On Saturday, March 7, at 2:00pm, Collazo-Lloréns will deliver an artist’s talk about the installation and her work.
Description: expand blur collapse is a new video installationby Nayda Collazo-Lloréns that explores the interconnected terrains of memory, language, and place. Drawing from research at the Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College, alongside personal and found sources, the work gathers and remaps selected words and traces that slip between legibility and abstraction.
Moving between archive and imagination, the installation becomes a personal and political exploration of loss, disjointed histories, and the pervasive sense of collapse that frames our present. Rather than stabilizing meaning, the work embraces fragmentation—allowing language to blur, expand, and reorganize itself into new constellations of sense and sensation.
Through layered images, shifting texts, and temporal disjunctions, expand blur collapse invites viewers to sit with uncertainty and partial knowledge: to consider how memory is constructed, how histories are interrupted, and how the archive can function not only as a site of preservation, but also as a space of erasure, speculation, and reinvention.
Nayda Collazo-Lloréns (born in San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice incorporates multiple mediums and strategies to explore concepts of navigation and dislocation. She earned an MFA from New York University and a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Beta-Local’s El Serrucho, among others, and was a Visiting Fellow at the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. She was part of the 2024–25 Rooted + Relational Fellows cohort at The Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO) at Hunter College.
Her work has been exhibited at El Museo del Barrio (New York), The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), Museum of Latin American Art (Long Beach), The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum (Miami), Bass Museum of Art (Miami Beach), Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, Museo Universitario del Chopo (Mexico City), and The Dowse Art Museum (New Zealand), among others. Her work was included in the 2025 exhibition Vaivén: 21st-Century Art of Puerto Rico and Its Diaspora at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota, with a bilingual catalog distributed by University of Minnesota Press.
Her work has also been featured in Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (Duke University Press), A to Z of Caribbean Art, and The Dark Would: Language Art Anthology, and reviewed in The New York Times, Art News, ArtNet, Hyperallergic, BOMB, and Newcity. She is currently based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Learn more about Nayda Collazo-Llórens trajectory here.
For more information, see https://www.elschomburg.com/art-gallery
El Schomburg (Espacio de arte interdisciplinario) presents “expand blur collapse,” a video installation by Nayda Collazo-Lloréns that explores the interconnected terrains of memory, language, and place. The exhibition will be on view from March 6 to April 30, 2026, at El Schomburg, located at 2538 West Division Street, Humboldt Park, Chicago, Illinois. On Saturday, March
