Artipedia - Arts News

Americas Society

(Still) Thriving on Adversity:
Contextualizing the Work of
Paula Trope

Wednesday, June 6
6 PM

680 Park Avenue at 68th Street,
New York
Free admission

Reservations are required.
Please email culture@americas-society.org or call (212) 277 8359. Members receive priority seating.

Lecture

Lidia Santos -Visiting Professor of Brazilian and Latin American Literatures at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York- will explore Paula Trope’s aesthetic approach to the ongoing social inequalities in Brazil.

About the speaker:

Lidia Santos was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she received a B.A. in Literatures of Portuguese Language from the University of Rio de Janeiro – UFRJ. Her PhD in Spanish American Literature was received from the University of São Paulo – USP. Before arriving at the Graduate Center, Professor Santos taught at Yale University and at the Federal Fluminense University – UFF, in Brazil.

She specializes in Brazilian and Latin American Literatures. Her research is mainly attached to contemporary issues, stressing the relationship between literature and other arts and contexts. Her enduring research on the intersection of literature and mass media in Brazil and Latin America was condensed in her book Tropical Kitsch. Mass Media in Latin American Art and Literature. Recently translated into English after two Spanish editions, Tropical Kitsch was named the best book in Brazilian Studies in a Comparative Perspective by the Latin American Studies Association. Professor Santos is also a RFI / Guimarães Rosa Prize recipient and author of two books of short stories and numerous scholarly works.

Currently, Professor Santos is finishing a book, which deals with the presence of soap operas’ techniques in contemporary literatures of Latin America. She is also working on the new trends of cosmopolitanism in Brazil.

This event takes place at Americas Society and is free and open to the public. For wheelchair access, please call in advance.

CURRENT EXHIBITION

On view from
May 24 to
August 31

Emancipatory Action:
Paula Trope and the Meninos
Curated by Gabriela Rangel and José Luis Falconi

Gallery Hours: Wedneday to Saturday 12 to 6 PM

The exhibition includes enlarged color prints presented as diptychs, triptychs or multiple panels in conjunction with works on video conceived and made by Trope and her partners, the so-called meninos, children who live in the favelas (shantytowns) of Rio de Janeiro. Trope has established a long-term collaboration with the meninos that results in series of photographs, videos, and, more recently, an urban planning project in Rio de Janeiro.

Emancipatory Action: Paula Trope and the Meninos is organized in conjunction with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. This exhibition is made possible with Public Funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency. Additional funding was provided by the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust and Humberto and Claudia Carvalho. Funds for the catalogue have been provided by the Bruce T. Halle Family Foundation. This exhibition is the Visual Arts component of the Americas Society’s “Embrace Brazil ” festival. Funding for this series was provided by David Rockefeller.

ABOUT US

Americas Society is the premier forum dedicated to education, debate and dialogue in the Americas . Its mission is to foster an understanding of the contemporary political, social and economic issues confronting Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada, and to increase public awareness and appreciation of the diverse cultural heritage of the Americas and the importance of the inter-American relationship.

For information on our cultural events, please visit http://www.americas-society.org or call (212) 277 8359.

Americas Society
680 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10021
T: (212) 249 8950
F: (212) 249 5868
culture@americas-society.org
http://www.americas-society.org

For more information go to: http://www.americas-society.org

Bonnefantenmuseum

Laura Owens
Paintings & studies 1994 – 2006
29 May – 19 August 2007

Bonnefantenmuseum
Avenue Céramique 250
Postbus 1735
NL-6201 BS Maastricht
Tel +31 (0)43 3290190
Fax +31 (0)43 3290199
http://www.bonnefanten.nl
E–mail: info@bonnefanten.nl

‘I feel like there’s a space of personal freedom for me where my art-making happens. When I go into that space, I’m completely in this world of possibility.’ Laura Owens

There are not many painters around at the moment who can evoke such far horizons and such a sense of freedom in their work as Laura Owens (1970 Euclid, Ohio), an American artist based in Los Angeles. Owens succeeds in making painting a challenging adventure for both the eye and the intellect of the viewer, in a way that is seductive yet disturbing. Owens blends the traditions of art history with those of applied and naïve art and abstract themes. Instead of experiencing the art of the past as a burden, Owens manages to use the history of ‘making pictures’ as a force in her work. It is the first time that 23 paintings of Laura Owens has been exhibited in the Netherlands, along with 90 preliminary studies that have never before left her atelier.

Owens’ virtuoso command of the profession arouses much admiration, as does her inventive appropriation of images and visual systems from all sorts of eras, categories and corners of the earth. These include 18th-century embroidery, Chinese landscape painting, Japanese prints, Op art, Color Field painting, textile patterns, folk art and her own photography. Owens’ habit of switching from landscape to abstract to figurative and back again conjure up free associations in the mind of the viewer.

Owens’ works seem to be made for pleasure, but they keep exploring new areas. With her casual eclecticism and diversity of cooperative ventures (she has made works with other artists, and organised exhibitions such as Cavepainting (2002) with Peter Doig and Chris Ofili), Owens provides resistance to traditional ideas about heroic isolation and ego-oriented signature style.

The exhibition has been prepared and organised by the Kunsthalle Zürich.
An illustrated oeuvre catalogue has been published by the Kunsthalle Zürich in collaboration with JRP | Ringier. The texts are by Gloria Sutton, Rod Mengham, Beatrix Ruf and Laura Owens in conversation with colleague artists; 224 pp.
ISBN 10:3-905770-11-3.

For more information go to: http://www.bonnefanten.nl/engels/index.html

Artangel

Artangel’s First International Commission

RONI HORN – VATNASAFN/LIBRARY OF WATER
Stykkishólmur, Iceland
Opens May 2007

http://www.libraryofwater.is

For the past 25 years, the work of Roni Horn has been intimately involved with the distinctive geography, geology, climate and culture of Iceland.

In collaboration with Artangel, Horn has developed VATNASAFN|LIBRARY OF WATER as a multi-faceted long-term installation and community centre in the town of Stykkishólmur on the western coast of Iceland north of Reykjavík. VATNASAFN|LIBRARY OF WATER is situated in Stykkishólmur’s former library building, overlooking the ocean on one side and the harbour and town on the other.

In the main viewing room, Horn has replaced stacks of books with a constellation of glass columns containing glacial water from around Iceland – gathered from the glacial tongues of Vatnajökull and the glaciers of Hofsjökull, Langökull and Snaefellsjökull. A customised floor is inscribed with both Icelandic and English words describing the state of the weather - or the mood of the viewer. Through the watery columns natural light is refracted and reflected onto the floor creating what Horn describes as a “kind of lighthouse in which the viewer becomes the lighthouse in which the view becomes the light.” Absorbing the visitor into a world of weather, water and light, the room also doubles as a space for reflection and a place for community activity from writers’ readings to women’s chess clubs, yoga classes and town meetings.

VATNASAFN|LIBRARY OF WATER also houses Weather Reports You, an ongoing collection of testimonies from people living in the locality, an alternative kind of weather reporting inspired by the site of the building as the place where the recording of meteorological conditions in Iceland was first initiated. Weather Reports You is also a publication and can be visited online at http://www.libraryofwater.is

VATNASAFN|LIBRARY OF WATER also launches an annual writers’ residency program with writers invited from the fields of fiction, non-fiction, poetry or screenwriting or from the natural sciences. The first writer in residence will be the Icelandic fiction writer Guorún Eva Minervudóttir.

Horn’s exhibition MY OZ is at Reykjavík Art Museum until 19 August 2007. See http://www.artmuseum.is for further information.

For further information contact Janette Scott on 020 7713 1400 or janette@artangel.org.uk

Notes

VATNASAFN|LIBRARY OF WATER is funded and supported by The Town of Stykkishólmur, The Ministry of Education, Science and Culture and The Ministry of Communications. The production of VATNASAFN/LIBRARY OF WATER and its associated programmes have been made possible by the generous support of: the Icelandic Parliament, FL Group, N1 and Straumur-Burdaras Investment Bank. With additional generous support from The VATNASAFN/LIBRARY OF WATER CIRCLE: Louise Bourgeois, Kathy and Richard S. Fuld Jr, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, LUMA Foundation, Anna Lísa Sigurjónsdóttir & Hreioar Már Sigurosson and those who wish to remain anonymous; Artangel International Circle: The Cranford Collection, Guy and Andrea Dellal, Joe and Marie Donnelly, Mala and Oliver Haarmann, David and Sarah Kowitz, Jennifer McSweeney, Catherine and Franck Petitgas, Pascale Revert and Peter Wheeler, Cora and Kaveh Sheibani, Iwan and Manuela Wirth, Anita and Poju Zabludowicz an
d Michael Zilkha; and VATNASAFN/LIBRARY OF WATER Patrons: Cees & Inge de Bruijn, Fifth Floor Foundation, Steinunn Jónsdóttir, Dominique Levy & Robert Mnuchin, L&M Arts, Mary Moore, Howard & Cindy Rachofsky, The Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, The Pulitzer Foundation, Alannah Weston and Sylvie Winckler. Thanks for support also from the Icelandic Tourist Board and Icelandair. The Writer’s Residency Programme is supported by The Annenberg Foundation. Weather Reports You is published by Steidl in association with Artangel.

Over the past decade, Artangel has built an international reputation as a pioneering producer of highly ambitious projects by contemporary artists across a wide range of different disciplines to realise the full potential of their ideas in the best possible circumstances Artangel is supported by Arts Council England, London, The Company of Angels, Artangel International Circle and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. http://www.artangel.org.uk

For more information go to: http://www.libraryofwater.is