Reading Public Museum Features Recent Works by Puerto Rican Artist Patrick McGrath Muñiz

From Reading Public Museum

Pictured above: Patrick McGrath Muñiz (America, b. 1974), The Bloom (Primavera), 2025, oil and metal leaf on polyptych panel, 48 x 34 inches, Loan, courtesy of the artist. © Patrick McGrath Muñiz, 2025.

The Reading Public Museum is pleased to announce the first of its summer shows: Patrick McGrath Muñiz: Recolecciones / Recollections, on view Saturday, May 31, through Sunday, Aug. 24, in the Irvin and Lois E. Cohen Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. The exhibit brings together a body of work by an artist who was raised in Puerto Rico and currently lives and works in Texas. The paintings and drawings move between the personal and the collective, the analog and the digital, the past and the ever-accelerating present. The show consists of 15 paintings, including a group of four large altarpieces inspired by the four seasons—each fusing allegory, archetype, and lived experience—alongside eight ink drawings, intimate retablos, and detailed preparatory drawings for La Isla, the artist’s Puerto Rico–inspired Lenormand deck of cards.

The bilingual title evokes two modes of remembering. In English, Recollections suggests memory—intimate, subjective, and elusive. In Spanish, Recolecciones implies a gathering or harvesting—deliberate, cyclical, and communal. These dual meanings reflect the artist’s ongoing exploration of memory not just as personal nostalgia, but as a process of cultural and symbolic reconstruction. Because McGrath Muñiz grew up in Puerto Rico and is now based in Texas, he measures his life in two halves: the first spent immersed in a more analog, nature-rooted world; the second shaped by digital life, political instability, and accelerating global crises. His work reflects this duality, drawing from Spanish Colonial iconography, Tarot symbolism, personal memories, and contemporary culture.

Born from the remnants of a studio and home lost to Hurricane María, these paintings are more than commemorations of a vanished past. They are meditations on the fragility and resilience of memory, the persistence of myth, and the artist’s search for meaning amidst disruption. In a time when algorithms increasingly dictate cultural narratives and technological innovation often distances us from our environment, the artist reflects on how industrialization and screen-based life have severed our once-sacred bond with the natural world and to ourselves—replacing direct sensory experience with simulation, and a grounded sense of place with disorientation.

In response, McGrath Muñiz turns toward symbolic language, archetypal storytelling, and a renewed sense of craftsmanship—constructing not only the painted images but also the intricate wooden frames that house them. Each composition is a visual excavation, a gathering of fragments—both autobiographical and universal—assembled into retablos that echo the sacred while interrogating the current modern paradigm.

Ultimately, Recolecciones / Recollections invites viewers to contemplate the irreplaceable nature of human experience: shaped by loss, sustained by ritual, and revealed through the stories we choose to preserve and reimagine.

During his visit to Reading, McGrath Muñiz will spend a day meeting students from a Reading School District Middle School, sharing information about his art and career. McGrath Muñiz will also present a public Gallery Talk in conjunction with The Museum’s Senior Series on Friday, May 30, at 1 p.m. A Member’s Opening Reception will be held on Friday, May 30, at 5:30 p.m. Please contact Hannah Alarcon at Hannah.Alarcon@readingpublicmuseum.org or 610-371-5850 x257 to register.

About the Artist

McGrath Muñiz holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Fine Arts of San Juan, Puerto Rico (2003), and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Savannah College of Art and Design (2006). His artworks reside in several public collections, including the National Hispanic Cultural Center and the Albuquerque Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico; The Nuevo Mexicano Heritage Arts Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum in Mesa, Arizona; The Reading Public Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania; and the New Orleans Museum of Art. His paintings also form part of numerous private collections across the United States, Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

About Reading Public Museum

The Reading Public Museum is supported in part by grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and is located at 500 Museum Road, Reading, PA. Admission per day is: $10 adults (18-64), $6 children/seniors/college students (w/ID), and free to members and children three years old and under. The Museum is open daily from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Visit online at www.readingpublicmuseum.org.

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Source: bctv