Elle Pérez Envisions New Residency Built On Family Legacy

A family house in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, is becoming the center of a new art-world project. Bronx-born photographer Elle Pérez is raising $100,000 to buy out relatives who jointly inherited the property, with the aim of turning it into Casa Pérez, an artist residency for Puerto Rican and other artists.

The house has been in Pérez's family since at least the 1920s, and their great-grandmother lived there a century ago. In an email, Pérez described it as both a site of family memory and a place that has shaped their practice over 15 years of visits to Cabo Rojo, on the island's southwest coast.

To help finance the purchase, Pérez has launched a website selling one-off chromogenic studio prints for $1,795 each in collaboration with Public Relations, a cultural office based in New York and Glasgow. The portfolio includes forest scenes, images of hands, and other intimate studies that extend the quiet, tender atmosphere associated with Pérez's photographs.

The project arrives at a moment when Cabo Rojo has become a flashpoint for controversial real estate speculation, including the planned $2 billion resort Esencia. That context gives Casa Pérez a significance that reaches beyond one family property: it is also a bid to preserve space for artistic use in a region under pressure from development.

Pérez's work has already circulated widely in the contemporary art field. It appeared in the Whitney Biennial in 2019 and in solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2022 and the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2021. Their galleries are 47 Canal in New York and Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles.

For Pérez, the residency is meant to carry forward a personal inheritance into a shared one. The house that once anchored a family history could, if the fundraising succeeds, become a place where other artists encounter the same landscape, and the same questions of return, belonging, and artistic formation.

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