Nov 19th 2022

Talk | On Thinking and Being Caribbean: A Roundtable Discussion

@ Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

220 E Chicago Ave, Chicago IL 60611

Opening Saturday, November 19th, from 2PM - 3:30PM

About the Event
What is the Caribbean? What does Caribbeanness mean to artists of the Caribbean diaspora?

On opening day of the MCA exhibition Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora 1990s-Today, join Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator Carla Acevedo-Yates and artists Christopher Cozier, Teresita Fernández, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons for a roundtable discussion. Building upon an in-depth conversation included in the catalog accompanying this exhibition, the curator and artists explore ideas behind the exhibition, how they see themselves as artists, and how they work within certain parameters, frameworks, and structures of the art world.

MCA Talks highlight cutting-edge thinking and contemporary art practices across disciplines. This presentation is organized by Daniel Atkinson, Manager of Learning, Adult Interpretive Programs, and the MCA’s Visual Art and Learning teams.

About the Speakers

María Magdalena Campos-Pons is an artist who works across an array of media, including photography, painting, sculpture, video, and performance. Addressing issues of history, memory, gender, and religion, her work investigates how each of these themes influences identity formation. Recalling dark narratives of the transatlantic slave trade, her practice honors the labor of Black bodies on sugar plantations, renews Catholic and Santerían religious practices, and celebrates revolutionary uprisings in the Americas. Campos-Pons has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada, among other institutions. She has presented more than 30 performances commissioned by institutions like the Guggenheim and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (both in collaboration with sound artist Neil Leonard). She also participated in the 49th Venice Biennial (in collaboration with Leonard), the 55th Venice Biennial, and Documenta 14. Her works are held in more than 50 museums around the world. Campos-Pons is currently the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University and lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.

 

Christopher Cozier is an artist living and working in Trinidad. Through notebook drawings and installations derived from staged actions, he investigates how historical and contemporary Caribbean experiences inform understandings of the wider world. Cozier is also the codirector of Alice Yard, a contemporary art space and collective based in Port of Spain. He was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2004 and is a Prince Claus Award laureate (2013). Exhibitions include Experiences of Oil, Stavanger Art Museum, Norway (2021–22); Fragments of Epic Memory, Art Gallery of Ontario (2021–22); Más Allá, el Mar Canta, Times Art Center, Berlin (2021); The Sea is History, Historisk, Oslo (2019); Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, Museum of Latin American Art, Los Angeles (2017); Entanglements, MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI (2015); Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, TATE Liverpool (2010); and Infinite Island, Brooklyn Museum (2007). Cozier also exhibited in the 11th Liverpool Biennial (2021); the Industrial Art Biennial, Croatia (2020); the 14th Sharjah Biennial (2019); and the 5th and 7th Havana Biennials.

 

Teresita Fernández’s immersive, monumental works are inspired by a rethinking of landscape and place, as well as by diverse historical and cultural references. Often drawing inspiration from the natural world, Fernández’s practice unravels the intimacies between matter, places, and human beings while exposing the history of colonization and the inherent violence embedded in how we imagine and define locations. Her work questions power, visibility, and erasure in ways that prompt reflective engagement. Fernández is a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards including a Creative Capital Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Artist’s Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award. Appointed by President Obama, she is the first Latina to serve on the US Commission of Fine Arts, a hundred-year-old federal panel that advises the president and Congress on national matters of design and aesthetics. Fernández’s works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Smithsonian Museum of American Art; MASS MoCA; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy, among others. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

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