Scratch Space Episode 14: ¿estamos bien?
Thursday, Oct 08, 2020 12:00PM
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Thursday, Sep 23, 2021 1:00PM
Scratch Space
Virtual Conversations on the Role of the Radical Imaginary
Virtual Conversations on the Role of the Radical Imaginary
In this series of virtual conversations, we bring together visual artists, scholars, composers, activists, writers, and others to explore what kinds of radical imaginaries can unfold in this moment of pandemic, racial reckoning, economic uncertainty, civil unrest, and environmental crisis. How do we think about what is possible? How can we use our imaginations to build a better present/future? How can we attend to the past in service of the future? And how can we retool and build better more equitable models for living and working together?
Item details
Date
Thursday, Feb 25, 2021 10:30AM
Name
Episode 14: ¿estamos bien?
Description
Join interdisciplinary artist Edra Soto and curator Susanna V. Temkin as they discuss Soto’s latest installation Graft presented at el Museo del Barrio as part of the ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21, the museum’s first national large-scale survey of Latinx contemporary art featuring more than 40 artists from across the United States and Puerto Rico. Soto and Temkin will discuss resilience and resistance and how to create experiences of belonging in the face of migration, displacement, colonialism, and structural racism. We’ll explore the challenges of curating a triennial during a pandemic, and how uncovering overlooked architectural histories can upend orthodoxies around what gets preserved and valued as part of our shared cultural heritage.
CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning will be available for the full duration of this event. If you have questions about accessibility for this event, please email us at info@montalvoarts.org.
Hosted by: Donna Conwell, Curator, Lucas Artists Residency Program and Kelly Sicat, Director, Lucas Artists Residency Program.
Artist Bios
Puerto Rican born, Edra Soto is an interdisciplinary artist and co-director of the outdoor project space The Franklin. Her recent projects, which are motivated by civic and social actions, prompt viewers to reconsider cross-cultural dynamics, the legacy of colonialism, and personal responsibility. Recent venues presenting Soto’s work include Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art's satellite, The Momentary (Arkansas); Albright-Knox Northland (New York); Chicago Cultural Center (Illinois); Smart Museum (Illinois); the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Illinois) and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, (Illinois). In 2019, Soto completed the public art commission titled Screenhouse on view at the Millennium Park, Boeing Gallery North through April 2022. Soto has attended residency programs at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Maine), the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency (Florida), Beta-Local (Puerto Rico), Headlands Center for the Arts, (California), Project Row Houses (Texas) and Art Omi (New York) among others. Soto was awarded the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship in 2016, the Illinois Arts Council Agency Fellowship in 2019, the inaugural Foundwork Artist Prize in 2019 and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painting and Sculpture Grant in 2020 among others. Between 2019-2020 Soto’s work was included in three exhibitions supported by the MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund: Repatriation at Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Cross Currents at the Smart Museum in Chicago, and Close to There in Salvador, Brazil. Soto is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which she received an MFA. She holds a BFA degree from Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico.
Susanna V. Temkin is Curator at El Museo del Barrio, and recently organized the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, Culture and the People: El Museo del Barrio, 1969-2019. She is currently one of the co-curators of ESTAMOS BIEN: La Trienal, the museum’s first national-scale survey of Latinx art. Prior to El Museo, she served as Assistant Curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres, Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin earned her master’s and PhD degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where her research concentrated on modern art in the Americas, with a focus on Cuba. Temkin has published essays and reviews in the Rutgers Art Review, Burlington Magazine, and Hemispheres; contributed a chapter to the forthcoming exhibition catalogue, Alice Neel: People Come First (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); and authored the chronology of Concrete Cuba: Cuba Geometri.