When Daniel Lind-Ramos titles a work Alegoría de una Obsesión, or allegory of an obsession, the obsession is not just his. It is a people’s, and they have been obsessing a long time. He knows that well, too, and translates it into obsessive art, at MoMA PS1.
Puerto Rico’s pride and fears began well before Hurricane Maria brought destruction to the old ways of life that Lind-Ramos loves. They continue to obsess, too, in what has become a permanent state of emergency. The artist himself piles on so much emergency gear that an assemblage becomes an installation. 
It can seem way too light in weight or, conversely, as ponderous as myth making. It stops short of engagement with actual events and their cost. Still, it could serve as shelter from the storm.
That allegory alone is an obsession, through September 4. Its stacks and carts add up to an overloaded wheelbarrow, well on its way to nowhere. The driver is determined all the same, even as his or her legs have worn down to mere poles ending in shoes. Waterproofed fabric hangs down like inadequate protection or yellowed jowls. It might be an allegory of survival and persistence or of hard labor and fatal loss, but it retains an air of comedy. Born in 1953, Lind-Ramos has been around quite a while himself, and he has not lost his sense of humor.
An allegory requires a narrator, and the artist supplies one—in a show called “El Viejo Griot,” or the old storyteller. He prefers to translate it as “the elder storyteller,” and, sure, a griot is a village elder as well as fabulist and magician. Regardless, the old guy has life in him, and he dances about on video in a preposterous costume that is surely more than half the point. (He or the artist scales a tree, half naked, in a second video.) Come to think of it, the three witches in Macbeth are tricksters and storytellers, too. And their stories trick Macbeth into treason and self-destruction, but only by telling the truth.
The griot lends his name to a sculpture as well, the largest in the show. The prow of a small boat heads right toward the viewer, while sacks of grain spread to either side, each bearing a date. (Lind-Ramos is nothing if not careful, even if you cannot pin down what he is taking care to do.) Two gloved hands beat the drums with their palms, while the prow bears a horn, silently accompanying the story. Again the work points to traditional ways of life, in fishing and food production. More waterproofing, in bright blue, ripples like stormy seas.
You may have seen Puerto Rican art just last year at El Museo del Barrio, where Raphael Montañez Ortiz made Saint Sebastian into a martyr to colonialism. You may have seen it again at the Whitney, 
where art after Hurricane Maria had its own obsession, with the heavy hand of the United States. (Other shows now at MoMA PS1 keep pointing fingers, too, like Iiu Susiraja and Onyeka Igwe.) Lind-Ramos is not into divisions, in a show subtitled “Una Historia de Todos Nosotros,” or a story of all of us. Titles that include Maria come with robed figures that could be the Virgin Mary herself. Besides, he takes a longer view.
For him, these are the Taîno people, tracing their roots to the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. They are still, as another work has it, sentinels of the new moon. The curators, Loíza Kate Fowle with Ruba Katrib and Elena Ketelsen González, give almost every assemblage it own room, in a small show that piles up fast. A work may have the center of a room, for laborers in motion, or the center of a wall, for a cabinet or a totem with many eyes. It can quickly lose its novelty. Still, there is room in the present for an old storyteller.
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