Art, Together

The Lit & Luz Festival of Language, Literature, and Art returns to the MCA to celebrate ten years of cultural exchange in Chicago and Mexico. The festival is uniquely known for bringing together distinguished Mexico- and Chicago-based contemporary artists and writers so that they may collaborate, creating interdisciplinary works across borders. Presented to sold-out shows at the Edlis Neeson Theatre in 2018 and 2019, the Live Show offers these collaborations as the culmination of the annual festival’s week of bilingual cultural events including readings, artist talks, gallery shows, and panel discussions occurring around the city and open to the public. In the spring of 2024, an encore of the Live Show will be staged in Mexico City at the Museo Universitario del Chopo, along with a new iteration of the festival’s weeklong programming.

Each year, the signature, anthology-style Live Show offers a new and distinct experience. Participants—each accomplished in their own discipline—are invited to approach their collaborations with a sense of play and experimentation, often reaching beyond their accustomed creative practices. Past productions have included sound collages performed over abstract animation, movement work scored by a pianist-poet, and dual-channel video projection accompanied by a live spoken word performance. Past participants have included Mariana Castillo Deball, Krista Franklin, Daniel Kraus, Valerie Luiselli, Yvette Mayorga, Cristina Rivera Garza, Andy Slater, and many more.

This year, the Live Show theme is TEN—both for the festival’s anniversary and, in Spanish, the imperative form of have—and artists will use this polyvalence to explore new, dynamic possibilities. This year’s cohort will offer six brand new works performed in Chicago for one night only. The show moves between Spanish and English, with live audio interpretation available, and will feature notable Mexico-based participants including artist, engineer, and activist Fernando Palma Rodríguez, dance and multimedia artist Galia Eibenschutz, and visual artist Alejandro Almanza Pereda, as well as essayist and poet Isabel Zapata, poet Maricela Guerrero, and poet and translator Adalber Salas Hernández. They join their Chicago collaborators: multimedia artists Edra Soto, Laura Letinsky, and Flor Flores, fiction writer Juan Martinez, playwright Nancy García Loza, and poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams. (Arrive early to see Soto’s installation as part of the MCA’s own entre horizontes.)

Now in its tenth edition, the Lit & Luz Festival supports the creation of new collaborative artworks between writers, visual artists, and musicians from Chicago and Mexico. The festival’s signature program, co-hosted at the museum, will feature live storytelling, music, poetry, video art, and extemporaneous performances.

About the Collaborators

Carrie Olivia Adams

Carrie Olivia Adams lives in Chicago, where she is the Promotions and Marketing Communications Director for the University of Chicago Press and the poetry editor for Black Ocean. Her books include Be the thing of memory, Operating Theater, Forty-One Jane Doe’s, and Intervening Absence, in addition to the chapbooks Proficiency Badges, Grapple, Overture in the Key of F, and A Useless Window.

Alejandro Almaza Pereda

Influenced by living in different parts of Mexico and the United States, Almanza Pereda became interested in how different cultures perceive danger and risk. Almanza’s endeavor focuses on materiality concepts by challenging objects conceptually and physically in sculptures and underwater photographs and videos. His work explores the culturally specific paradigms of safety, danger, and architecture through the juxtaposition and pairing of materials and objects. These juxtapositions achieve a sense of tension from makeshift environments with specific connotations, such as fragility, value, weight and power.

Almanza Pereda has a Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, New York. He has done solo shows in different institutions including the San Francisco Art Institute, Museo El Eco, Art in General, the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, and the College of Wooster Art Museum. His work has been featured at the Istanbul Biennial, ASU Museum, Museo de Arte Moderno, Dublin Contemporary 2011, 6a Bienal de Curitiba, El Museo del Barrio and the Queens Museum. Alejandro has attended the Skowhegan and Bemis art residencies and received grants from the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, CIFO Grant Program, the Harpo Foundation, Sistema Nacional de Creadores in México, Harker Award for Interdisciplinary Studies at SFAI, Theodore Randall International Chair in Art and Design at Alfred University and the Black Cube Artist Fellowship. His work was featured in the Art 21 close-up series. He is currently a member of La Rubia te besa, an art band project. He lives between Guadalajara and Mexico City.

Galia Eibenshutz

Galia Eibenschutz is an artist, performer and choreographer. She graduated with a BA in Visual Arts at ENAP-UNAM in Mexico City, and a master’s degree at DasArts, now DAS, in Amsterdam. She has shown at Jumex Museum, Tamayo Museum, Arte Carrillo Gil Museum, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, El Chopo University Museum, Dance Theater Mexico, City, Hospicio Cabañas, The Cedar Cultural Center, the Center for the Arts and Communication, Miami Basel, SMAK Museum Gent, and YYZ Gallery Toronto, among others. She was selected as a choreographer for a McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowship, in 2019.

Flor Flores

Flor is a transdisciplinary artist and poet whose creative works revolve around the concept of queer belongings. Some themes in their works include flowers as a symbol for self (Flor), Kiki – a queer monarch butterfly that enjoys going to the discotheque, which has evolved into an experimental publishing project, and “X” – an Epic poem about the letter X, exploring its significance in Latinx identity and its other uses as a gesture of erasure, inclusion, voidance, and a placeholder for a language that is yet to come.

They recently exhibited at Everybody & Good Naked Gallery and have been featured in reviews and publications such as Artmaze, Sixty Inches From Center, New American Paintings, and Newcity Art. They are excitedly anticipating the publication of “Kiki: A Sky of Changing Lights” this fall.

Nancy García Loza

Nancy García Loza is an award-winning, self-taught pocha playwright rooted in Chicago, Illinois and Jalisco, México. Her audio drama BRAVA: a folktale con música launched Make-Believe Association’s inaugural season (with mention from the The New York Times), receiving nominations in six categories at the 2019 ALTA Awards and winning Outstanding Original Music in a Play for the song “Corrido de la Brava”. She has enjoyed residencies with: Goodman New Stages, Goodman Future Labs, Goodman Playwrights Unit; Steppenwolf Theatre; The New Harmony Project; Oregon Shakespeare Festival Black Swan Lab; SPACE on Ryder Farm; The Inception Project with Paramount Theatre; UIUC, Fornés Playwriting Workshop, Chicago Dramatists Tutterow Fellowship, and more. Her work has also been developed by: Steppenwolf Theatre; Goodman Theatre; Paramount Theatre; The New Harmony Project; National Museum of Mexican Art (The Joyce Award, APAP); Chicago Dramatists; Sol Project (NYC), and more. She has been recently awarded by the National Endowment of the Arts, The Joyce Foundation, APAP, and more. She writes from instinct, plays by ear, and is urgently determined to bring the pocha experience, in all its complexity, rawness, and lyricism, to the stage. She is Mexican American, no hyphen. She is currently under commission with Steppenwolf Theatre and the National Museum of Mexican Art.

Maricela Guerrero

Maricela Guerrero is the author of nine poetry collections, including A río revuelto (Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 2022); El sueño de toda célula / The Dream of Every Cell, (Ediciones Antílope/Instituto Veracruzano de la Cultura, Mexico City, 2018) translated by Robin Myers (Cardboard House Press, 2022); and Kilimanjaro, translated by Stalina Villareal (Cardboard House Press, 2018). Guerrero has been a fellow of the prestigious National System of Artists in Mexico and she won the Clemencia Isaura Prize in 2018 with her book The Dream of Every Cell. Recently, she has ventured into narrative with the novel Bronce dorado, in which she reflects on youth, queer love, and the conditions that the system has imposed on women, questioning the commonplaces of femininity. This work was a finalist for the Dharma-Casa Wabi award. Her work has been translated into German, Swedish, and French.

Laura Letinsky

Receiving her BFA from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, and her MFA in Photography from Yale University’s School of Art, Laura Letinsky has been a Professor at the University of Chicago since 1994. She shows with Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC, and Document, Chicago, and exhibits internationally including PhotoEspaña, Madrid, the Israeli International Photography Festival, Mumbai Photography Festival, MIT, Cambridge, MA, Basel Design, The Photographers Gallery, London, and the Denver Art Museum, CO. Awards include the Maison Dora Maar, France; Canada Council International Residency, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, The Canada Council Project Grants, The Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work is published in monographs and catalogs such as To Want For Nothing (Roman Nvmerals, 2019), Time’s Assignation (Radius Books, 2017), Ill Form and Void Full (Radius Books, 2014), Feast, (Smart Museum of Art, UC Press, 2013), After All (Damiani, 2010), Hardly More Than Ever, (Renaissance Society, 2004), Blink (Phaidon Press, 2002), and Venus Inferred (University of Chicago Press, 2000).

Juan Martinez

Juan Martinez is the author of the novel Extended Stay, released in January 2023 as part of the University of Arizona Press’s Camino del Sol series. Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called it “a fresh and stunning debut.” His short-story collection Best Worst American was released in 2017 by Small Beer Press and won the inaugural Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for debut speculative fiction. His work has appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including McSweeney’s, TriQuarterly, Conjunctions, NIGHTMARE, Huizache, Small Odysseys, The Sunday Morning Transport, NPR’s Selected Shorts, Ecotone, Shenandoah, Sudden Fiction Latino, and Norton’s Flash Fiction America.

Fernando Palma Rodríguez

Fernando Palma Rodríguez (Mexican, b. 1957) combines his training as an artist and mechanical engineer to create robotic sculptures that utilize custom software to perform complex, narrative choreographies. His works respond to issues facing indigenous communities in Mexico, addressing human and land rights, violence, and urgent environmental crises. Palma Rodríguez lives in the agricultural region of Milpa Alta outside Mexico City, where he runs Calpulli Tecalco, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of Nahua language and culture. Central to Palma Rodríguez’s practice is an emphasis on indigenous ancestral knowledge, both as an integral part of contemporary life and a way of shaping the future. Fernando Palma Rodríguez lives and works in San Pedro Atocpan, Mexico. He was the subject of a retrospective at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (2017). His work has been included in group exhibitions at FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France (2016); Parallel Oaxaca, Mexico (2016); Nottingham Contemporary, England (2015); the Biennial of the Americas, Denver, Colorado (2015); Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, Mexico (2014); and SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2014). Also, there was an exhibition of his work at MoMA in NYC called “In Ixtli in Yollotl, We the People” (2018).

Adalber Salas Hernández

Adalber Salas Hernández (Caracas, 1987) is a poet, essayist and translator. He is the author of several books of poems including Salvoconducto (XXXVI Arcipreste de Hita Prize; Valencia, Pre-Textos, 2015. Translated into German by Geraldine Gutiérrez-Wienken and Marcus Roloff as Aus dem Kopf durch die Nacht, Parasitenpresse, 2021), mínimos (Madrid, Amargord Ediciones, 2016), La ciencia de las despedidas (Valencia, Pre-Textos, 2018. Translated into English by Robin Myers as The Science of Departures, Kenning Editions, 2022, longlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry), [a love supreme] (Caracas, Letra Muerta, 2018), and Nuevas cartas náuticas (Valencia, Pre-Textos, 2022. Translated into Italian by Alessio Brandolini as Nuove carte nautiche, Edizioni Fili d’Aquilone, 2023). He also has published Insomnios, a volume of essays on Venezuelan poetry; Estábamos muertos y podíamos respirar, a reflection on Paul Celan’s poetics; Clarice Lispector: el lugar de la poesía (Santiago de Chile, Ril Editores, 2019), on Clarice Lispector’s work; Palabras sin dueño. Variaciones sobre la traducción literaria (Mexico City, Dirección de Literatura UNAM / Periódico de Poesía, 2019), a volume of essays on literary translation; Isolario (Valencia, Pre-Textos, 2023); and Retrato del traductor con cabeza de perro (Madrid, Libros de la resistencia, 2023). He has translated works by Marguerite Duras, Antonin Artaud, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, Pascal Quignard, Mário de Andrade, Lorna Goodison, Louise Glück, Patrick Chamoiseau, Anne Boyer, Li Young-Lee, Roger Robinson, Frankétienne, Shara McCallum, Nicholas Laughlin, Jamaica Kincaid, Safiya Sinclair, Kendel Hippolyte, Édouard Glissant, and Mark Strand – among others. His work has been anthologized in the collections Ai margini di un mondo sconosciuto (Rome, Edizioni Fili d’Aquilone, 2018; translated by Alessio Brandolini), De ningún viaje se vuelve (Guadalajara, Mantis Editores, 2019), and Morir no es un arte (Cáceres, Liliputiences, 2023). He holds a Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures from NYU.

Edra Soto

Edra Soto is a Puerto-Rican born artist, curator, educator, and co-director of the outdoor project space, The Franklin. Soto instigate meaningful, relevant, and often difficult conversations surrounding socioeconomic and cultural oppression, erasure of history, and loss of cultural knowledge. Growing up in Puerto Rico, and now immersed in her Chicago community, Soto’s work has evolved to raise questions about constructed social orders, diasporic identity, and the legacy of colonialism. Soto has exhibited extensively at venues including El Museo del Barrio (NY), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago (IL), ICA San Diego, (CA), Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling (NY) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY). She has been awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, the Illinois Arts Council Agency Fellowship, the inaugural Foundwork Artist Prize, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award and the US LatinX Art Forum Fellowship among others. Soto exhibited and traveled to Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Cuba as part of the MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund. Soto has attended residency programs at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME, Beta-Local, PR, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency, FL, Headlands Center for the Arts, NY, Project Row Houses, TX and Art Omi, NY, among others. Upcoming exhibitions include her participation at the Chicago Architecture Biennial, O’Hare’s International Airport Terminal 5 Expansion Project, Untitled Miami Beach with Morgan Lehman Gallery and Art Basel Miami Beach with Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Soto holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree from Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico. The artist lives and works in Chicago.

Isabel Zapata

Isabel Zapata was born in Mexico City in 1984. She studied political science at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and philosophy at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of the titles Las noches son así (Lumen); Alberca vacía/Empty Pool, translated by Robin Myers—bilingual edition (Argonáutica); Una ballena es un país (Almadía); In vitro (Almadía) [In Vitro: On Longing and Transformation translated by Robin Myers, (Coffee House Press, 2023)]; and Tres animales que caben en el agua (Almadía). Her work has been included in Mexican journals such as la Revista de la Universidad de México, Periódico de poesía, and Letras Libres, among others; and international publications such as World Literature Today and Ancrages (Canada). In 2015 she, along with four friends, founded Ediciones Antílope under the motto, “We make books that we would like to read,” and their catalog includes narrative, la crónica, poetry, and essay. She received a 2016-17 grant from FONCA’s Jovenes Creadores, a prestigious government program supporting Mexican artists and writers.

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Tags: Adalber Salas Hernández, Alejandro Almaza Pereda, Carrie Olivia Adams, Chicago, Edra Soto, Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Flor Flores, Galia Eibenschutz, Juan Martinez, Laura Letinsky, Lit & Luz Festival, Live Arts | Lit & Luz Festival: Live Magazine Show, Maricela Guerrero, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Nancy Garcia Loza, Near North Side