Carlos Betancourt
Carlos Betancourt (b. 1966, San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a Puerto Rican multidisciplinary artist based in Miami whose practice explores memory, beauty, identity, nature, spirituality, and the ways personal experience becomes part of a larger collective history. For more than four decades, he has worked across photography, painting, collage, assemblage, sculpture, mixed media, and large-scale installation, drawing deeply from Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, as well as Miami, Greece, and Mexico—places whose environments, layered histories, and cultural hybridity continue to inform his work.
Syncretism, ritual, spirituality, nature, family histories, and popular culture converge throughout Betancourt’s practice. Working through processes of accumulation and transformation, he approaches images, objects, symbols, and fragments as carriers of memory, repositioning them within new visual systems and contexts. The past, in his work, is never fixed or distant but continually reappears and is reinvented within the present. Memory transforms, expands, and endures across time, place, and form, suggesting that nothing ever truly disappears but instead continues to evolve, reemerge, and exist in constant continuity.
Betancourt’s work also reflects on the mystery of beauty and our endemic attraction to it—not simply as ornament, but as a primal form of recognition: an instinctive pull toward what feels eternal, interconnected, and spiritually familiar.
Betancourt’s work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; Pérez Art Museum Miami; the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art; NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale; the San Antonio Museum of Art; The Bass; Museo de Arte de Ponce; and the Palm Springs Art Museum, among others.
His work has been exhibited internationally and presented at major art fairs, including Art Basel, ARCO, and ZONA MACO. His projects and exhibitions have been featured in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Art in America, Gagosian Quarterly, The Wall Street Journal, Artforum, and ARTnews.
Betancourt is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Florida Department of State Millennium Cultural Recognition Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Bas Fisher Invitational Grant, the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art People’s Choice Award, and the Miami Beach Arts Council Grant. He has also worked as a curator and furniture designer and has collaborated extensively with architect Alberto Latorre on architectural, site-specific, environmental, and public art commissions.
Betancourt and Latorre established the Betancourt-Latorre Foundation in 2017. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, its primary mission is to support artists based in Miami and the Caribbean Basin. In October of that year, the organization raised funds and collected supplies that were quickly donated to communities affected by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. In 2020, the Betancourt-Latorre Foundation awarded more than $30,000 in grants to artists economically affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Carlos Betancourt: Imperfect Utopia, was published by Rizzoli/Skira in 2015. Featuring more than 250 images, the book includes texts by Robert Farris Thompson, Richard Blanco, and writer and art critic Paul Laster. Betancourt participated in numerous book signings at museums and institutions nationally and internationally, as well as public dialogues with Blanco, curator José Carlos Diaz, and Bonnie Clearwater, director of NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, among others. The book was received with great success, entered a second printing, and was selected as Art Book of the Month by Interview magazine.
That same year, Re-Collections, a major 30-year mid-career retrospective of Betancourt’s work, opened at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC) in San Juan. Spread across six galleries and the museum’s main atrium, the exhibition included more than 50 works and several large-scale installations, including a recreation of En La Arena Sabrosa (2004), a floor installation consisting of hundreds of Dixie-cup sandcastles made with sand and soil collected from the beaches and rivers of Puerto Rico. Like the book, the exhibition received excellent reviews and was selected as an Artforum Critics’ Pick.
During Art Basel Miami Beach in 2016, The Pelican Passage: Tide by Side, a large-scale artwork commissioned by the Faena Arts District in celebration of the opening of the Rem Koolhaas-designed Faena Forum, was selected by Voguemagazine as one of the top five artworks of Art Basel.
In June 2017, Betancourt was invited to speak at TEDxRVA in Richmond, Virginia. His presentation, The Art of Memory, focused on his artistic practice and revolved around the themes of memory and change.
Carlos Betancourt: IMPRINTED, an exhibition bringing together works by the artist from 2001–2017, opened at the Southeast Museum of Photography at Daytona State College, Florida, in November 2017. In June 2018, Betancourt received the People’s Choice Award for his installation and exhibition in the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art at the Orlando Museum of Art.
In November 2021, Betancourt presented Into the Everglades, a large-scale digital projection in downtown Miami. The video formed part of an effort with several nonprofit organizations to celebrate the culture, flora, and fauna of the Everglades while bringing attention to this fragile and unique environment and the endangered Florida panther.
In December 2021, Milagros!, a temporary installation commissioned by the City of Miami Beach, was unveiled during Art Basel week. The installation was composed of hundreds of suspended metal elements inspired by the ex-votos and tamata charms of Mexico and Greece, with sculptural elements fabricated by local artisans in Oaxaca, Mexico. Also in December 2021, Betancourt presented What Lies Beneath: Tipping Point, featuring a monumental inflatable sculpture in the form of an iceberg installed within a swimming pool.
These projects, together with Betancourt’s Landscapes Re-Imagined series (2020–21), were prominently featured in a New York Times article by Brett Sokol published on November 24, 2021.
Also in 2021, in collaboration with animator Milly Cohen, Betancourt created several animated artworks that were successfully auctioned as NFTs, with a percentage of the proceeds donated to The ReefLine.
A major public art and environmental milestone is also on the horizon for Betancourt and architect Alberto Latorre, his frequent collaborator. The Reef Star—a large-scale project conceived together with Latorre as part of The ReefLine initiative—is expected to be deployed off the shore of Miami Beach. Composed of more than 50 monumental 3D-printed sculptural elements forming a giant star, the installation is conceived simultaneously as public art and living infrastructure. The Reef Star will function as an artificial reef and evolving marine ecosystem and has already received significant international attention.
Betancourt was co-founder of 801 Projects, an arts studio center providing studio space for visual artists based in Miami. He has also been actively involved in efforts to preserve the Miami Marine Stadium, the landmark mid-century architectural structure in Key Biscayne, Florida. He continues to draw inspiration primarily from personal experience and the natural world, including the Florida Everglades, El Yunque rainforest in Puerto Rico, and his travels, particularly to Greece and Mexico.
Betancourt and Latorre established the Betancourt-Latorre Foundation in 2017. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, its primary mission is to support artists based in Miami and the Caribbean Basin. In October of that year, the organization raised funds and collected supplies that were quickly donated to communities affected by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. In 2020, the Betancourt-Latorre Foundation awarded more than $30,000 in grants to artists economically affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Foundation is currently raising funds for its next project, South Beach: Art, Culture and the Last Underground, a book and exhibition focusing on the influential art and culture of Miami from the 1980s to the present.
The artist new studio, designed in collaboration with architect Alberto Latorre, is located in Little River, Miami Beach.