There are no snow days in Puerto Rico.

But for a few years in the 1950s, around Christmas, snow did make its way to the tropical island. Children rode sleds and had snowball fights for the first time.

The moisture didn’t come at the hands of a mercurial Mother Nature, but via San Juan Mayor Felisa Rincón de Gautier, who fell in love with snow during her years in New York. Beginning in 1955, she asked Eastern Airlines to bring 2 tons of gift snow to her constituents.

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Once it arrived, the snow didn’t last long, of course, but citizens reveled in its oddness while it lasted.

Only 40 seconds of footage of one of those snow deliveries still exists, and it is featured in Puerto Rican artist Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s 2014 video installation, “Lluvia con Nieve (rain with snow).” As part of the Contemporary Film, Video and Sound series, it opens Saturday at Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College and runs through June 20.

To obtain her snow, Rincón de Gautier, who developed the program that became the family support model known as Head Start, connected with executives at Eastern Airlines at a conference in Florida. They asked if she’d accept a gift, such as a watch.

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“Instead of a gift she asked for snow to be brought in,” said Katja Rivera, the FAC’s curator of contemporary art. “It was probably connected to a little bit of a spectacle, like it was a good bit of PR for her, especially given the underserved government services that are in Puerto Rico and the fact it’s an economy the U.S. draws on but doesn’t necessarily give back to.”

Muriente found footage of the event in a Washington, D.C., archive, where she’d been thinking about Puerto Rico and the information, or lack thereof, that gets circulated from the island to the mainland. The footage she found doesn’t exist anywhere on the island and can only be accessed in the states, Rivera says.

For the FAC series Rivera was exploring archives, noting the word archives comes from the Greek word that means public records.

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“When I think about archives I think about something for scholars, that they access when they do research,” she said. “But public records suggests something for everyone, that we should all have access to, so thinking about the relationship of Puerto Rico as a colony to the U.S. and what folks have access to on the island.”

In the installation, which was featured at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, Muriente slowed down the 40 seconds of footage, pulling it like taffy into 14 minutes and 49 seconds worth of black and white imagery, all overlaid with mambo music. It plays on two screens, each one showing the same source material but different parts at different times. Old newspaper clippings also are included in the exhibit.

“It’s thinking about who holds the histories and information of a particular place,” Rivera said.