Organizado en tres secciones entrelazadas, Elsewhere(s) abarca múltiples generaciones y períodos de tiempo. La primera sección, Territorios Inexplorados, explora la larga tradición latinoamericana de cosmología sobrenatural que presenta a los “observadores de estrellas” prehispánicos de las culturas olmeca y del mezcala que datan entre los siglos III y IX a. C.
Known for featuring exciting mid-career and emerging artists around the globe, with over 145 galleries and four guest curators—Natasha Becker, Miguel A. López, Estrellita Brodsky and José Falconi—this year’s edition proved not only the largest, but the most diverse and ambitious yet.
To celebrate its 10th edition, this year, Untitled Art expanded its curatorial platform by inviting four guest curators—Natasha Becker, Miguel A. López, Estrellita Brodsky, and José Falconi—who all contributed in creating a diverse and global conversation about contemporary art. Below are 10 exceptional booths from Untitled Art Miami Beach’s 2021 edition.
Untitled Art Miami Beach (November 29-December 4, 12th Street and Ocean Drive) is celebrating its 10th edition by inviting four curators to stage presentations at the show. Natasha Becker of the de Young Museum in San Francisco is uniting 11 galleries around the theme of black voices, while art historians Estrellita Brodsky and José Falconi have focused theirs on less traditional, more outlying ways of understanding the universe.
The 10th edition of the event will also be the biggest it’s ever been, with over 145 international galleries exhibiting and a new section, Nest, which will aim to support emerging galleries, collectives, and non-profits. But there’s more. This year, Untitled has also tapped four powerhouse guest curators to create special themed shows within the fair: Natasha Becker, Miguel A. López, Estrellita Brodsky, and José Falconi.
Twenty-five enlarged color prints arranged as diptychs and multiple-panel works, as well as a slide show and video, are included in “Emancipatory Action: Paula Trope and the Meninos”, at the Americas Society in Manhattan, organized by Gabriela Rangel, the society’s director of visual arts, and José Falconi, curator at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. This is Ms.Trope’s first exhibition in the United States.
Paula Tropes point of departure is grounded in the sociopolitical concerns and radical experiments developed in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s by artist Helio Oiticica and filmmaker Glauber Rocha. Both decisive figures founded Neo-Concretism, Tropicalia and Cinema Novo, advocating projects of emancipation through the visual arts.Inspired by their legacy Trope presents photographs co-produced by the Meninos whom she met in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, and who live in the urban shantytowns vast areas discarded from modern society.
“Emancipatory Action” grew out of a documentary project intended to profile street children (meninos) in Rio’s poor urban neighborhoods, called favelas. Originally, Trope was to photograph children from the Pereirão favela and the large-scale model of their neighborhood that they constructed from brick and debris, the Morrinho Project.
Most of the pieces in this mini-retrospective either document or propose some form of social intervention, hence their usefulness. The artist found inspiration from masters of political theater such as Antanas Mockus, the former mayor of Bogota, who hired mimes to mock traffic violators because he thought ridicule was a more effective deterrent than fines.
As the exhibition “The Great Swindle: Works by Santiago Montoya” comes to a close at the Art Museum of the Americas at the Organization of American States, a panel discussion, “Santiago Montoya’s Work in the Colombian Context,” will be held this Friday, March 24, at 6 p.m. The exhibition closes March 26. The museum, open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., is located at 201 18th St. NW.
Over the last ten years, Montoya’s artworks have been comprised of vast canvases and banknotes. Paper currency is the base of most of his works, with the purpose of re-contextualizing our relationship with money. The exhibition’s launch in DC is timely as it helps us focus more attention to the issue of currency especially in the constantly changing global financial environment such as Brexit, low interest rates and potential impact of currency exchanges.
March 1, 2017
Currently on display on the main floor of the Art Museum of the Americas, The Great Swindle by Colombian artist Santiago Montoya explores our relationship with money. The artist uses patterns and collages to show off the various colors and national images on currency from around the world.
Rising Colombian artist Santiago Montoya garnered an international reputation for his exploration of our interaction with money. He uses real currency notes from various countries whose power dynamics interest him – either because of their domestic governance or their roles on the world stage – to create pointillist portraits of power.
The seemingly Godlike power money wields certainly makes the world go round, whether in the U.S., China, Argentina or Zimbabwe. Montoya’s works examine the singular yet universal aspirations of different nations to accumulate wealth and prosperity, while laying bare the shaky foundations on which this prosperity is often built.
September 28, 2016
Comprised of works that Montoya has made over the last ten years, The Great Swindle exhibition at the OAS AMA | Art Museum of the Americas represents a sustained examination of the complicated, fluid relationships we have with financial systems.
“Bittersweet,” Colombian artist Santiago Montoya’s exhibition at the Somerville Museum, reflects that fraught relationship with wealth. It expands on a previous show mounted in Colombia, “El Dorado Chocolaterie.” Organized by Peruvian curator José Luis Falconi, it’s a sad, smart exhibition revolving around objects of desire: chocolate sculptures dipped in gold.
February 16, 2022
Bittersweet is the latest installment of a project which the artists began in Colombia under the title El Dorado Chocolaterie, a reference to the mythical gold-covered city that expeditionists sought throughout the 16th century. And while the promises of hot chocolate, cacao-infused sweets, and hand-made ceramics were sufficient to draw a crowd, it was the idea of a promise itself that Falconi and Montoya hoped to lay bare for audiences to reflect on.
I’ve worked with chocolate for the last four years, but ironically, I only started drinking hot chocolate for breakfast a couple of weeks ago. My morning chocolate comes from our family plantation in the region of Quindío, Colombia, the country where I was born. My father planted the cacao trees; my mother roasted and ground the beans. While I sip this dark and delicious re-discovered miracle, I remember how my personal story with chocolate began.
From Gustave Courbet’s stone breakers to task-based dance, artists have variously attempted to depict the laboring body. Chilean-born, New York–based Cristóbal Lehyt’s latest solo endeavor also references industry, effort, and production: The show consists of a series of 260 paintings (the number of weekdays in a year) and a large plywood box containing dozens of tangled and woven string sculptures that obliquely refer to textile manufacturing and its obsolescence.
If someone can rest assured of the robustness of our logical system, and perhaps even find shelter in the dreadful paradoxes that unravel when one tries to go against its most basic principles, that someone has to be Cristóbal Lehyt, whose artistic proposals have always been based on teasing out a number of the most illustrious of logical aporias one can think of.
Through a collection of artifacts, ranging from photographic documentation to works of art, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck’s pedacito de cielo (1998—2008) stages a return to the 1950s, to the moment of Venezuela’s state-led modernization as evidenced in Carlos Villanueva’s architectural projects, images of which begin pedacito de cielo’s installation. Balteo Yazbeck’s work, what he calls an ‘ intimate museum’, is not concerned with the accurate reconstruction of events in a way that would present history as the consequence of individual actors.
¿Cómo abordar una obra de arte que sólo se declara a sí misma como tal en el mismo momento en que se descifra desde el punto de vista conceptual? ¿Cómo podría ese desciframiento inducir, de manera estratégica —incluso coercitiva— a la percepción de las continuas repercusiones del contradictorio proyecto del modernismo? Éstas son dos preguntas fundamentales que planteó la fascinante exposición Pedacito de cielo (1998-2008), de Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck, presentada por la Galería Sert de la Universidad de Harvard.
Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck’s exhibit at the Sert Gallery in the Carpenter Center, titled “Pedacito del Cielo (1998-2008),” tackles the tangled exponents of Latin American geometrical abstraction, from modernist architecture to sculpture to a video of performance art. At the same time, the show is also a supremely individual creation. Balteo Yazbeck, while not the curator of the exhibit, is perhaps best called the artist of the exhibit.
“Dissent!” is a fiery greatest hits of five centuries of such protest art. The 62 prints and publications offer a who’s who of art rabble rousers: Honoré Daumier, Francisco de Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, José Guadalupe Posada, Pablo Picasso, Joseph Beuys. It’s important that we see and study this stuff, but the challenge for institutional exhibits — a challenge curator Susan Dackerman doesn’t solve — is how to embrace protest art without neutralizing it.
Reyes, who started out as an architect, makes conceptual art, architectural models, and ritualistic projects, all intended to change and refresh the public’s mind-set through the element of surprise. Some of these are wonderfully ambitious yet sensible, such as his vision for an abandoned, triangle-shaped high-rise in Mexico City: turn it into a vertical green space with hundreds of hydroponic units, and put in solar panels to create enough electricity to pump the water.
Baldomero Alejos, whose photographic documents of life in the Ayacucho region of Peru currently hang in the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) building, considered himself a tradesman, not an artist. But considering his unusual talent for composition, dynamism, and detail as displayed in the exhibit, it seems that he sorely underestimated himself.
Cities that sprawl out of control, with hundreds of thousands of people living on the margins, both geographically and economically, in makeshift structures prone to collapse. That’s the starting point for Jaime Ávila’s two current Boston-area shows: ”Life Is a Catwalk (La Vida Es Una Pasarela),” at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, and ”4th World (Cuarto Mundo),” at the Boston Arts Academy.
In the course of the past three decades, Adál Maldonado, known as ADÁL, has shifted his creative focus from introspective explorations into the human experience (love, relationships, family history, and self-identity), to more critical work that aggressively confronts issues of government control and exploitation. Since 1996, ADÁL’s artwork has dealt with the racial, political and economic status of Puerto Ricans living in the United States, particularly those in New York City
The artist, known as Adal, has developed over the years from a photographer to a conceptual and installation artist. You can witness the progression in “Blue Bananas on Fire,” at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and see its culmination in “Blueprints for a Nation,” a searingly funny show of his current work at the Center for Latino Arts.
Colombia’s identity, captured by Munera’s 52 black and white prints, is far from Hollywood’s rendering of a country ruled by the decadence of warring drug lords. The collection includes prints of a boy bathing, a pair of old platform shoes, a hospital room and a band from the Fiesta de San Pedro Munera, which together create an illuminating dialogue with his homeland.
The title “Code-Switcher” refers to the practice of shifting between languages. In this case it alludes to the displacement and even disappearance of Uruguayans, and the fractured lives of people who don’t “belong” anywhere. Many of these pieces are purposely difficult to see: the almost invisible Plexiglas dots climbing the stairwell, for instance, asking to be “read” through touch; the white paper diptych called “Maps,” embossed with images of a human heart, its parts labeled as in a medical text, and the words “welcome home,” but with no indication of where home is.
The small wax faces adorning the walls of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) seem to follow passers-by with their ghost-like presence and identical, penetrating open mouths. These strange voyeurs are part of the center’s new exhibition by artist Rosalia Bermudez titled “Code-Switcher.”
At the intersection of Irving and Kirkland streets, Haiti meets Harvard. “Crossroads,” an exhibition of Haitian artist Marie-Hélène Cauvin’s paintings and drawings, opened at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies last weekend to a friendly crowd of Harvard students, art aficionados and members of the local Haitian community.
Cuba and its rich history come to life in the photography exhibit now on display at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. According to Jose Luis Falconi, Latin American and Latino Art Forum coordinator and curator of the exhibition, “Cuba is very difficult to frame.” But this small show, representing two generations of Cuban history, manages to express the complexity of Cuban society in a way accessible to Harvard students.
El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima está ubicado en el distrito de Barranco, uno de los más húmedos y representativos de la franja costera de la ciudad. En diciembre de 2018, empecé mi trabajo en el MAC Lima como parte de un equipo que se encargó de proponer una programación reflejo de nuevos enfoques curatoriales y de investigación, centrados en las prácticas artísticas peruanas contemporáneas.
En los albores de la modernidad, el fray dominico Tomás Campanella soñó con una ciudad tan perfecta que su diseño correspondía directamente al sistema solar copernicano y todos sus muros estaban recubiertos de todo el saber de su tiempo para que sus habitantes puedan acceder a este cuando quisieran. A esta utopía la llamó la Ciudad del Sol.
El 20 de septiembre, inauguró su exposición Arte sin fronteras en las instalaciones de Casa Orizaba en la colonia Roma de la Ciudad de México, donde los artistas Ana Roldán, Rubén Ortiz-Torres y Laercio Redondo —bajo la curaduría de José Falconi— presentaron un conjunto de piezas comisionadas por LIFEWTR en las que exploran la noción de frontera no desde el aspecto formal ni territorial, sino como una categoría cultural desde la que pueden plantearse procesos creativos pertinentes para el contexto actual.
Santiago Montoya se propone ilustrar la carga histórica y las implicaciones políticas del paso del Quindío para Colombia, así que, como dice el curador José Falconi, se supone que uno como espectador tiene la posibilidad de experimentar lo que implicó atravesar dicho territorio.
Exhibido en los tres pisos del edificio El Dorado, Mal paso (y otros senderos) comprende tres instalaciones mayores, cada una de ellas reinterpretando la experiencia de cruzar un camino sospechoso hacia la riqueza y la fortuna, tratando que el espectador se cuestione y reflexione sobre las limitaciones e ilusiones del proyecto nacional colombiano.
Mal paso y otros senderos es una instalación del artista Santiago Montoya que lleva al visitante al corazón del Eje Cafetero. En concreto, a un punto de la accidentada geografía colombiana conocido como ‘El paso del Quindío’. Debido a lo dificil que es recorrerlo, desde la Colonia se han tejido varios mitos alrededor del lugar, reflejados en la literatura colombiana y en los trazados de la expedición del científico Alexander von Humboldt.
Ballardo trata de “profundizar en la analogía entre la implementación de los patrones geométricos preincaicos y los de una etapa modernista del Arte, la que hoy en día se construye como una misma imagen, el lenguaje de las artes”. Esta exposición consta de dieciocho obras, de las cuales nueve son pinturas sobre diferentes soportes (plexiglás, acero y fuselajes de aeronaves), tres esculturas (plexiglás, acero y fuselajes de aeronaves), una serie de grabado de nueve piezas y cinco instalaciones de partes de aeronaves.
Curada por José Luis Falconi, esta propuesta está sustentada en la investigación que Augusto Ballardo (Perú) inició hace cinco años. Tales indagaciones iniciales sobre el uso de la geometría y sus múltiples utilizaciones en el arte actual, generaron en el artista una búsqueda histórica de las relaciones que pueden existir entre los objetos culturales contemporáneos y el pasado prehispánico.
Analogías entre nuestra arquitectura contemporánea hasta los elaborados textiles geométricos de la época prehispánica, entretejen un lenguaje espacial propio, que podemos encontrar en cada cultura estudiada por Augusto Ballardo, explorando conexiones que convergen en una misma historia sin fronteras.
Augusto quiso sintetizar su larga investigación con una exposición. Su reciente muestra, Plumaje. El esplendor del vuelo, reflexionó sobre migraciones y movimientos culturales estableciendo un contraste entre el arte plumario ancestral y la estética de las aeronaves contemporáneas. En la Galería Impakto, reunió pinturas, grabados y esculturas; a la vez, gestionó una exhibición paralela de arte plumario en el Museo Textil Precolombino Amano: en esta se planteó un recorrido por la iconografía de aves en los textiles peruanos.
Acerca de la muestra, ha comentado José Luis Falconi, curador: “es, antes que nada, un diálogo entre dos artistas a partir de sus propia exploración de las posibilidades inherentes a los materiales con los cuales han elaborado sus respectivas obras. Tanto para Huffman como para Cárdenas es allí, en esa relación primigenia con el material, en donde comienza la escultura, en donde la materia se transforma en concepto al adquirir forma, densidad, textura.
La muestra, curada por José Falconi del Centro Rockefeller de Harvard y Ángela Gómez del Museo Nacional, reúne más de 100 obras, en su mayoría de formato pequeño, que hacen parte de algunas de las series más emblemáticas de Fernell Franco, como ´Amarrados´, ´Prostitutas´, ´Interiores´, ´Demoliciones´ y ´Retratos de Ciudad´, aunque no muestra ninguna en conjunto -la mirada curatorial hizo énfasis en la búsqueda técnica de Franco, más que en sus temas y preocupaciones conceptuales.
Haber crecido en la casa que después sería el estudio de un fotógrafo y haber sido retratado por él desde la infancia ofrece un punto de vista bien particular. El autor de este perfil retrata muy de cerca a uno de los principales fotógrafos caleños.
La exposición está conformada por 101 obras y tiene dos ejes temáticos: Procesos y bocetos, cada uno compuesto con tres series. En la primera el artista explota los problemas de especialización y la narratividad del tiempo en el medio fotográfico.
This Exhibition by Fernell Franco showcases his experiments and career-long inquiries into the photographic medium. The works included in the show represent an attempt to convey the interest of this artist in capturing the image of a city in a constant process of creation, destruction, and recreation, an interest that has led him to propose works that redefine the boundaries of photography.