Hosted by NYU Center for the Humanities and co-sponsored by The Latinx Project, join Ronny Quevedo, Elia Alba, Juana Valdes, and Marcela Guerrero for a roundtable and conversation moderated by Karen Mary Davalos.
Panelists
Ronny Quevedo works in a variety of mediums including sculpture and drawing. His work "posits profound interconnections between the circular movements engendered by sport and the expansive pathways forged by the artist’s personal migration story from Ecuador to the Bronx," Ananda Cohen-Aponte writes in Hyperallergic. His work has been exhibited at The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Queens Museum, Upfor Gallery (Portland), James Fuentes Gallery and Foxy Productions (NYC). Quevedo holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art and BFA from The Cooper Union.
Elia Alba, born in Brooklyn 1962, is a multidisciplinary artist, who works in photography, video and sculpture. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Hunter College in 1994 and completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001. She has exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Science Museum, London; Smithsonian Museum of Art; ITAU Cultural Institute, São Paulo; National Museum of Art, Reina Sofía, Madrid and the 10th Havana Biennial. She is a recipient of the Studio Museum in Harlem Artist-in Residence Program in 1999; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, 2002 and Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant 2002 and 2008; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Workspace Program, 2009 and Anonymous Was A Woman Award, 2019. Collections include the Smithsonian Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, Bronx Museum and the Lowe Art Museum. Her book, Elia Alba, The Supper Club, published by Hirmer, produced by the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, and critically acclaimed by The New York Times, brings together artists, scholars and performers of diasporic cultures, through photography, food and dialogue to examine race and culture in the United States. She is currently guest curator for El Museo del Barrio's upcoming survey of contemporary Latinx art, ESTAMOS BIEN - LA TRIENAL 20/21 opening March 2021.
Juana Valdes is a multidisciplinary artist using printmaking, photography, sculpture, ceramics, and site-specific installations, to explore issues of race, transnationalism, gender, labor, and class. Functioning as an archive, Valdes’s work analyzes and decodes experiences of migration as a person of Afro Caribbean heritage. Born in Pinar del Rio, Cuba, Valdes migrated to the United States in 1971. She completed her M.F.A. in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts and her B.F.A. in Sculpture at Parsons School of Design. Valdes is an awardee of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the National Association of Latinos Arts and Cultures, the Ellies Creative Award, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Valdes is an Associate professor in the Department of Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work is part of the Pérez Art Museum Miami Permanent Collection, and has been included in group exhibitions in museums and university galleries such as Site Santa Fe, El Museo del Barrio, P.S. 1 MOMA; MOCA, North Miami; and galleries in Berlin, Amsterdam, and Sydney. Her most current solo show ‘Rest Ashore’ was at Locust Projects 2020.
Marcela Guerrero is Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Recently, she was part of the curatorial team that organized Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945. In summer 2018, Guerrero curated the exhibition Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture. From 2014 to 2017 she worked as curatorial fellow at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Prior to joining the Hammer, she worked in the Latin American and Latino art department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Guerrero holds a PhD in art history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Karen Mary Davalos is trained in cultural anthropology, receiving her PhD from Yale and the MA and BA from Stanford University. Currently, she is a professor and chair of Chicano and Latino Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research and teaching explore questions of representation, agency, power, spirituality and feminist methods. In 2017 she launched the major initiative, Rhizomes of Mexican American Art since 1848, which will produce a co-authored, multi-volume, full-color book and a shareable, searchable online digital platform linking art collections and related documentation from libraries, archives, and museums.