The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and The Latinx Project Present
The Supper Club: Reflections on the Landscapes of Latinx Art
Tuesday, September 24
from 6 to 8:30pm
Location: NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis,
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor, NYC
Elia Alba, The Orisha (Juana Valdes), 2014. [Image Description: Artist Juana Valdes stands upright on a boat with her hands to her side, wearing a sky blue dress with a long train that cascades before her. The ocean surrounds the boat and whispy white, gray, and blue clouds and a blue sky provide a backdrop to her elegant and stoic stance.]
Introduced by Sara Reisman, the Foundation’s Executive and Artistic Director and editor of Elia Alba: The Supper Club, this book launch reflected on the contemporary issues surrounding the racial and identity landscapes that Latinx artists have to maneuver within the cultural sector. Reflections on the Landscapes of Latinx Art featured artist Elia Alba discussing Latinx Artists and the making of The Supper Club book; Naiomy Guerrero, inaugural Curatorial Fellow of the Pérez Art Museum Miami’s Diversifying Art Museum Leadership Initiative and co-organizer of the first Latinx Art sessions in Miami; Juana Valdes on Latinx Art: Beyond the Binaries; and Guadalupe Maravilla on Displacement and the Mental Health of the Undocumented.
Please note that due to unforeseen circumstances, artist Juan Sanchez was not in attendance for the program.
Bios
Elia Alba was born in Brooklyn, New York. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Hunter College in 1994 and completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001. She has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad. Those include The Rhode Island School of Design Museum; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The Science Museum, London; ITAU Cultural Institute, Sao Paolo; National Museum of Art, Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the 10th Havana Biennial. She is a recipient of numerous awards and residencies for example, Studio Museum in Harlem Artist-in Residence Program in 1999; New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, Crafts 2002 and Photography 2008; Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant, 2002; Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant 2002 and 2008; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Workspace Program, 2009, and Recess Analog, 2012. Her work is in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, and Lowe Art Museum to name a few. For the past 6 years, she has been working on a project titled The Supper Club. The project brings together artists, scholars and performers of diasporic cultures, through photography, food and dialogue to examine race and culture in the United States. A book on The Supper Club, produced by The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and published by Hirmer was released in Spring 2019. She is currently Artist-in-Residence at The Andrew Freeman Home in the Bronx.
Naiomy Guerrero is an art historian and arts equity advocate. Her research focuses on highlighting contemporary Latinx artists born or long living in the U.S., their contributions to the cannon of U.S. art history and development of the Latinx art market. Guerrero’s work as a writer, curator, and on social media has highlighted the intersection of blackness with the larger discourse of Latinx and Latin American art, and how that intersectionality has often been marginalized. Her research has been shared by Arts.Black, NPR Latino, Artsy, and Teen Vogue.
Guerrero is the inaugural curatorial fellow of the Pérez Art Museum Miami’s Diversifying Art Museum Leadership Initiative. The two-year fellowship, endowed by the Walton Family Foundation and the Ford Foundation, aims to offer curatorial training to young professionals from historically underrepresented groups in curatorial and museum leadership. She is a Posse Foundation scholar and holds a B.A. in Art History from DePauw University. She co-curated the Perez Art Museum’s 35th Anniversary permanent collection exhibition ‘The Gift of Art’, currently on view and co-organized the first Latinx Art Sessions convening to discuss the U.S. Latinx Art Cannon with scholars, art professionals, creatives, and the community at large in Miami.
Guadalupe Maravilla is a transdisciplianary artist who was part of the first wave of undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s from Central America. In 2016, as a gesture of solidarity with his undocumented father—who uses Maravilla as his last name in his fake identity—Irvin Morazan changed his name to Guadalupe Maravilla. As an homage to his own migratory history, and to that of others, Maravilla makes work that acknowledges the historical and contemporary contexts of immigrant culture, notably belonging to Latinx communities. Maravilla gained notoriety for his performances which are expansive and immersive, incorporating choreographed rituals, hand-made costumery, fusion music, smell, theatre, and audience participation. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Richmond, Virginia, where he is an Assistant professor at VCU. He received his BFA from School of Visual Arts, and his MFA from Hunter College in New York.
Juana Valdes is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work traces, recollects, and records her own personal experience of migration. Her artwork is informed by her Afro-Cuban ethnicity and the experience of growing up in America. Throughout her career, Valdes has participated in a range of exhibitions and residencies most currently at the European Keramic Work Center in the Netherlands (2012), the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (2009), the Artist Residency at the Center for Book Arts (2007), and the Smack Mellon Studio Program (2004). Past exhibitions include a solo show at SENSEI Gallery as part of the SENSEI Exchange Series Part 008: In the Fold in New York (2013), and travelling exhibitions Multiplicity: Contemporary Ceramic Sculpture (2007-08) and Multiple, Limited, Unique: Selections from the Permanent Collection of the Center for Book Arts (2011-13).
The Latinx Project at NYU explores and promotes U.S. Latinx art, culture and scholarship through creative and interdisciplinary programs. Founded in 2018, it serves as a platform linking scholarship, media and activism to foster critical thinking about US Latinxs. Our use of Latinx indicates an openness to gender, sexual and racial inclusivity, while also paying attention to the multiple ways in which Latinx organize and forge community around nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, and other designations. The project advocates for Latinx Studies and explores the generative power of Latinxs in U.S. society