Born in 1933, Rafael Ferrer has encountered, engaged, and challenged art movements that define the twentieth century, including European surrealism, American post-minimalism, and Latino neo-expressionism. He has worked in sculpture, drawing, and painting, and also with assemblage, collage, actions, and installation. His prolific and wide-ranging body of work embraces contradictory aesthetic tendencies, from conceptualism to figurativism, using the seemingly simple materials at hand--everyday objects, scenes, music, and language--toward divergent ends. Ferrer's diverse career makes him difficult to "map" according to the prevailing narratives for art history. Simply put, he has been in too many places! Now in his seventh decade as an artist, Ferrer is more active than ever before. Two recent installations, "Pizarras" (2005) and "Contraband" (2011), are composed of wood-framed slate tablets (ninety-seven and sixty, respectively), the kind once used by schoolchildren. Each of these small blackboards contains an image-text painting that engages in wordplay in either English or Spanish. In "Pizarras," one tablet reads "voyvengo" (I'm coming/I'm going). The image of a white-black vehicle facing in two directions suggests a contemporary version of the pushmi-pullyu animal of the Doctor Dolittle children's books. Interestingly, Ferrer does not map "voy" and "vengo" onto each half of the white-black vehicle, but instead runs them together into a single handwritten word ("voyvengo") in which the last three letters appear over the black portion of the vehicle. In this way, Ferrer's work suggests two words and an abbreviation: "voy" (I'm going), "ve" (go [imperative] or you see), and "NGO" (nongovernmental organization). It is in this slippage that Ferrer opens up a space for contingency--the hallmark of his earlier post-minimalist work--wherein going and coming play out against larger, unpredictable forces. It is the space of the artist himself, creating. (Contains 7 figures.)