Alexia Benavent-Rivera

In Nuestro Oro (2026), Alexia Benavent-Rivera transforms the banana into an object of conspicuous value. A hand-beaded golden fruit rests beneath a found glass cloche, surrounded by small hand-built porcelain frogs. The display recalls a museum specimen, reliquary, or luxury object: protected and isolated under glass, the banana is no longer presented as an inexpensive everyday commodity but as treasure. The gesture literalizes the artist’s description of the banana trade as a “new gold rush,” in which the fruit became a source of extraordinary wealth extracted from Latin American land and labor.

The dense surface of amber and gold beads confers beauty and preciousness on the fruit while also pointing to the process through which natural and cultural resources are converted into commodities. Benavent-Rivera places this glittering banana in deliberate contrast with the earthier ceramic fruit elsewhere in her Rana Republic series: polished, abundant, and ready for display, it represents the fully commodified endpoint of a system that transforms the resources of Latin America into wealth for distant markets.

Around and across the glass, the porcelain frogs interrupt the apparent stability of the display. Frogs recur throughout Benavent-Rivera’s work as symbols of fertility, renewal, and collective resilience, drawing on their cultural significance in Puerto Rico and Panama as well as pre-Columbian imagery. Their proliferation makes the cloche porous rather than sealed: life gathers around the commodity and exceeds its container. Nuestro Oro thus turns the banana’s familiar golden color into a critique of extraction while reclaiming it as a symbol of cultural value, survival, and agency.