Moderated by Ed Morales
Panelists: Esperanza Cortés, Rachelle Mozman Solano, Ronny Quevedo and Mary Valverde
A public program in conjunction with Canté Jondo/Deep Song, a solo exhibition by Esperanza Cortés.
Moderated by Ed Morales, author of Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture (Verso, 2018), this panel will include four Latinx artists who grew up in the U.S. They will discuss how Latinx identity informs their experience as artists, as well as the aesthetic principles that inspire their work. The conversation will also aim to demystify how notions of Latinidad can obscure and oversimplify the interpretation of an artist’s work. Combining testimonies of lived experience, attention to craft, and how an artist’s body and spirit inhabit the work, the panel will reveal the various threads of identity and background that come together in their artistic practice.
Ed Morales is an author, journalist, filmmaker, and poet who teaches at Columbia University. He is the author of The Latin Beat and Living in Spanglish. He has written for the Village Voice, Nation, New York Times, Rolling Stone, and other publications and is a regular commentator on NPR. His film Whose Barrio? premiered at the New York Latino International Film Festival. He lives in New York City.
Born in Bogotá, Colombia and based in New York, Esperanza Cortés has exhibited nationally at venues such as the Neuberger Museum of Art, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Queens Museum, El Museo del Barrio, MoMA PS1, Socrates Sculpture Park, Cleveland Art Museum, and Lorenzo Homar Gallery, Philadelphia. Her work has also been shown internationally in Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Japan, Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Spain and Greece. Residencies include McColl Center for Arts + Innovation, Museum of Arts and Design Artist Studio Residency, BRIC Workspace Program, Caldera Residency, Fountainhead Residency, MoMA PS1 International Residency, and Abrons Art Center residency, among many others. She has also received numerous awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, U.S. Department of State Art in Embassies Program, the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace Program, and the New York Foundation for the Arts Sustained Achievement in Visual Arts Award.
Rachelle Mozman Solano grew up in New York City of parents who shared the experience of immigration. She works between New York and Panama the country of her maternal family. Starting often from her biography and family history Mozman Solano explores how culture shapes individuals, how environment conditions behavior. Her work is concerned with the intersection of mythology, history, economics, and the psyche through photographs and films that confound fact and fictional narrative. In her work narrative is explored as inherent to our humanity and shaped by perception. Mozman Solano’s art is deeply informed by her clinical work in psychoanalysis. In 2019 Mozman Solano had a solo exhibition, Metamorphosis of Failure at Smack Mellon, and participated in Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, Artspace, New Haven and in 2018 she exhibited El espejo opaco de Gauguin, Arteconsult, Panamá. In 2019 Mozman Solano was awarded a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship. In 2016 Mozman Solano was awarded a NYC Film and Media Grant, Jerome Foundation fellowship and she has held residencies at LMCC workspace, Smack Mellon, The Camera Club of New York, and Light Work. Her work has been published in the Light Work annual Contact Sheet, Presumed Innocence, Exit magazine and will appear in Critical Lens: A Latino Perspective on the History of Photography, and numerous other publications.
Ronny Quevedo (b. 1981, Guayaquil, Ecuador) works in a variety of mediums including sculpture and drawing. Quevedo’s work was included in the recent Whitney Museum’s exhibition Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art. Solo exhibitions include Every Measure of Zero, Upfor Gallery, Portland (2019); Field of Play, Open Source Gallery, NYC (2019); the sixth man, James Fuentes Gallery (2019); no hay medio tiempo / there is no halftime, Queens Museum (2017); Home Field Advantage, Casita Maria Center for Arts & Education, Bronx, New York (2015); and Ulama, Ule, Olé, Carol Jazzar Gallery, Miami (2013). He is a recipient of a Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists and A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art. He has participated in residencies at the Triangle Arts, Socrates Sculpture Park, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Kala Art Institute, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Project Row Houses, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and Smack Mellon. Quevedo received his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2013 and BFA from The Cooper Union in 2003.
Mary Valverde (b.1975, Queens, New York) is an interdisciplinary artist, professor, and writer based in New York. Valverde teaches at Hunter College and has lectured at institutions including The Ford Foundation, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, F.I.T., and Long Island University’s MFA departments. Valverde serves as a Commissioner (Sculptor seat), Arts Commission / Public Design Commission of the City of New York, since 2015. She received her MFA at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012 and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY in 1999. Valverde is the recipient of University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Design’s Full Dean’s Diversity Fellowship, and in 2010 received the Artist Fellowship, Inc. Individual Artist Award and the Mayer Foundation Grant. Mary A. Valverde was the 2011 MFA Lecturer at the ICA Philadelphia, was the Thomas Hunter Ceramic Artist in Residence in 2014, artist in residence at Artist Alliance Residency 2007, and at Aljira Center for Contemporary Art’s Emerge Program in 2006. Valverde has exhibited her work at MoCA North Miami, The New Jersey State Museum, BRAC, Art Center South Florida, El Museo del Barrio, The Queens Museum of Art, Jersey City Museum, Momenta Gallery, Saltworks Gallery, Corridor Gallery, Rush Arts Gallery, Diaspora Vibe Gallery, Abrons Art Center, Cuchifritos Gallery, Aferro Gallery, Tribes Gallery, among others. Valverde has contributed to various projects through the BASE collective.
