Join us for a conversation between artist-in-residence Estelle Maisonett and artists Juan Sánchez and Shellyne Rodriguez. This conversation will be moderated by the exhibition’s curator Johanna Fernández. The panel will be followed by a reception.
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About the Participants:
Estelle Maisonett is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in the Bronx, New York. Her work is an investigation of how personal and socio-cultural relationships to objects and materials inform preconceived notions of identity. With a practice comprising photography, printmaking, sculpture painting, installation and video, Maisonett’s life-size collages explore how Latinx identity has historically been composited by fragments of cultures locally and abroad. Maisonett received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art in 2023 and her BFA from SUNY Purchase College in 2013.
Born to working-class Puerto Rican immigrants in Brooklyn, NY, Juan Sánchez is an influential American visual artist, and one of the most important Nuyorican cultural figures of the latter 20th century. Maintaining an activist stance for over forty-five years, his art is an arena of creative and political inquiry that encompasses the individual, family, the communities with which he engages, and the world at large. Sánchez has produced an extensive body of work that consistently addresses issues that are as relevant now as they were in the 1980s – race and class, cultural identity, equality, social justice, and self-determination. He emerged as a central figure in a generation of artists using diverse media to explore ethnic, racial, national identity and social justice in 1980s and ’90s. Sánchez exhibited and lectured throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
Shellyne Rodriguez is an artist, educator, writer, and community organizer based in the Bronx. Her practice utilizes text, drawing, painting, collage and sculpture to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation.
Johanna Fernández is the author of The Young Lords: A Radical History (UNC Press, February 2020), a history of the Puerto Rican counterpart of the Black Panther Party. She teaches 20th Century US history and the history of social movements. Dr. Fernández’s recent research and litigation has unearthed an arsenal of primary documents now available to scholars and members of the public. She directed and co-curated ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York, an exhibition in three NYC museums cited by the New York Times as one of the year’s Top 10, Best In Art.
Supporters
The Spring 2024 Artist-in-Residence exhibition is made possible with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the New York University Office of the Provost.