Long before Hurricane Joaquín began to brew, its warm vapors hovering menacingly along the Atlantic in a slow, furtive murmur, SS El Faro was doomed. In October 2015, the cargo vessel carrying food, medicine, and other critical supplies was caught in the swells of Joaquín on its journey from Florida to San Juan; subsequent investigations uncovered troubling safety violations, including outdated lifeboats, that contributed to the deaths of the ship’s entire crew of 33. “Collapsed Soul” (2020–21) by Gamaliel Rodríguez, part of an exhibition of works by contemporary Puerto Rican artists at the Whitney Museum of American Art, portrays the ship’s ghostly hull evanescing in a pall of metallic blues in the middle of the ocean.
