About RAFIQUE

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Rafael “Rafique” Enrique Vega Feliciano (Ponce, Puerto Rico, 1999) is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose practice centers on the preservation and reinterpretation of Puerto Rican cultural identity. Working across muralism, portraiture, printmaking, and drawing, Vega Feliciano integrates Caribbean Indigenous iconography, syncretic religious symbolism, and contemporary urban aesthetics to explore themes of ancestry, spirituality, and collective memory.

His imagery often merges expressionist portraiture with pattern systems rooted in Taíno visual traditions, creating compositions that invoke ritual, resistance, and the ongoing impact of colonial histories. Through techniques ranging from washes and dry brush to aerosol interventions, his works embody a dialogue between tradition and modernity, gesture and structure, the personal and the communal.

Vega Feliciano’s work has been exhibited in institutions and cultural spaces in Puerto Rico, the United States, Spain, and Cuba. Notable presentations include solo exhibitions at the Capitol of Puerto Rico and the Exhibition Hall of the Educational Region of Ponce. He has participated in group exhibitions across the island and abroad, including in Instituto de Subcultura, Casa de los Contrafuertes, REM Project, and Taller Cultural Luis Díaz Oduardo in Santiago de Cuba.

Beyond the gallery space, Vega Feliciano has executed public murals internationally, including projects in Holyoke, Massachusetts; Llagostera, Catalonia; and Santiago de Cuba. In Puerto Rico, his interventions form part of key public art initiatives such as Santurce es Ley, Yaucromatic, Color Caribe, and Ponce es Ley, contributing to the island’s expanding contemporary mural movement.

Through narrative, mark-making, and cultural symbolism, Vega Feliciano’s practice reflects a commitment to honoring heritage while envisioning new visual languages for Caribbean identity in the global context.