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Puros Exitos
Puros Exitos was an exhibition I organized at Beverly’s in Downtown New York City in December 2021. Artists exhibited included Marisol Ruiz, Eric Santoscoy-McKillip, and myself.
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These Lessons at Spring Break Art Show
These Lessons was re-mounted in February 2020 at Spring Break Art Show in New York City. Artists exhibited were Brooke Burnside, Diego Mireles Duran, Eric Santoscoy McKillip, and myself.
These Lessons at MASS Gallery in Austin, TX
These Lessons was a show I organized at MASS Gallery in November 2019 and featured artworks and a mural by Brooke Burnside, Diego Mireles Duran and myself. In addition to the exhibition a book of photographs and collages by all three artists was published by MFA Brown Art Press. The following text was written for the exhibition:
In the text on pedagogy and psychology Frames of Mind, Howard Gardner outlines a theory of multiple intelligences that gestures at a broader and more multifaceted approach to learning and teaching. Gardner outlines eight pedagogical categories, in which we are all skilled at varying levels: linguistic, logical mathematical, visual/spatial, musical, naturalist, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. The artists in These Lessons use visual and spatial learning methods to understand the residues of colonial histories and expand the western cultural vocabulary to include the traditions of their homelands and ancestors. The visual and the spatial offer an alternative to the codified and inequitable linguistic and logical mathematical approaches that most educational structures are built on. Through abstraction, architecture, and color theory, these artists are learning and unlearning lessons from their families, home countries, adopted countries, and formal education.
MFA Brown Art
MFA Brown Art is an ongoing project I organize in collaboration with black and brown artists and practitioners. In summer 2019 MFA Brown Art was in residence on Governors Island for the month of June and held free workshops and an exhibition of works by Marisol Ruiz, Juan Leonardo Bravo, and Josh Rios. Workshops were led by Martha Tenney, Zakiya Collier, Daniel Almeida, Max Juila, and itinerant working group Extension or Communication (Grimaldi Baez, Rana Fayez, Tania Marrero Rios and Ricky Yanas). In addition to this residency MFA Brown Art has an ongoing publishing practice and awards cash research grants.
MFA Brown Art is a position that recognizes the cultural knowledge that Brown makers bring into institutional spaces and is an attempt to remunerate Brown Artists for the labor we are forced to perform in them. Brown Artists bring alternative art histories and invaluable cultural traditions into western institutional spaces. Brown identity is not a flattening socio-political entity but rather a deepening of space for individual narratives.
A Score to Keep Time, A Score to Lose Time, but Never Yourself, In It at Sadie Halie Projects in Minneapolis MN
I curated this solo show by Sonia Louise Davis at Sadie Halie Projects in September of 2017. The following text was written for the show:
Improvisation is essential when navigating inequitable power structures. The performances, texts, and objects made by Sonia Louise Davis are the result of a radical politic of resistance acutely informed by personal experience and a cosmology of activism, post-colonial art, and critical race theory. Sonia's practice expands on her training as a jazz vocalist into thoughtfully staged solo and collaborative performances that integrate experimental sound, objects, movement, and time into deeply affecting experiential works. Similarly, her improvisational skills are felt in the abstract paintings, prints, and sculptures that ignore imagined boundaries of western art materials in favor of weavings interrupted by LED filament and translucent paintings on paper infused with coconut oil. In the fog of our current political climate these experimental and abstract works are experienced as beacons of veracity. In a time where facts are losing political currency Sonia Louis Davis' work is more essential than ever.