A sculptor and installation artist, Helen Escobedo engages in a playful dialogue with the urban environment. This retrospective covers five decades of Escobedo's work, is laced with humor (umbrellas become turtles, for instance), and brings to English for the first time a comprehensive look at an important Mexican artist.
"The first exhibition to offer a critical assessment of the artistic experimentation that took place in Mexico during the last three decades of the twentieth century. The exhibition carefully analyzes the origins and emergence of techniques, strategies, andmodes of operation at a particularly significant moment of Mexican history, beginning with the 1968 Student Movement, until the Zapatista upraising in the State of Chiapas. Theshow includes work by a wide range of artists, including Francis Alys, Vicente Rojo, Jimmie Durham, Helen Escobedo, Julio Galán, Felipe Ehrenberg, José Bedia,Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Francisco Toledo, Carlos Amorales, Melanie Smith, and Alejandro Jodorowsky, among many others. The edition is illustrated with 612 full-colorplates of the art produced during these last three decades of the twentieth century reflect the social, political and technical developments in Mexico and ranged from painting andphotography to poster design, installation, performance, experimental theatre, super-8 cinema, video, music, poetry and popular culture like the films and ephemeral actionsof 'Panic' by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Pedro Friedeberg's pop art, the conceptual art, infrarrealists and urban independent photography, artists books, the development ofcontemporary political photography, the participation of Mexican artists in Fluxus in the seventies and the contribution of Ulises Carrión to the international artist book movement and popular rock music, the pictorial battles of the eighties and the emergence of a variant of neo-conceptual art in 1990. The exhibition is curated by Olivier Debroise, Pilar García de Germenos, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón"--Provided by vendor.
Sabotage is the deliberate disruption of a dominant system, be it political, military or economic. Yet in recent decades, sabotage has also become an artistic strategy most notably in Latin America. In Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile and Argentina, artists are producing radical, unruly or even iconoclastic work that resists state violence, social conformity and the commodification of art. Sabotage Art reveals how contemporary Latin American artists have resorted to sabotage strategies as a means to bridge the gap between aesthetics and politics. The global status of and market for Latin American art is growing rapidly. This book is essential reading for those who want to understand this new, dissident work, as well as its mystification, co-option and commercialisation within current academic historiographies and art-world curatorial initiatives."
One of America's leading interpreters of the Chicana experience dismantles the discourses that "frame" women who rebel against patriarchal strictures as "bad women" and offers empowering models of struggle, resistance, and rebirth.
Shortlisted for the 2020 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize Winner of the 2019 Art Journal Prize from the College Art Association What is the role of pleasure and pain in the politics of art? In Touched Bodies, Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra approaches this question as she examines the flourishing of live and intermedial performance in Latin America during times of authoritarianism and its significance during transitions to democracy. Based on original documents and innovative readings, her book brings politics and ethics to the discussion of artistic developments during the “long 1980s”. She describes the rise of performance art in the context of feminism, HIV-activism, and human right movements, taking a close look at the work of Diamela Eltit and Raúl Zurita from Chile, León Ferrari and Liliana Maresca from Argentina, and Marcos Kurtycz, the No Grupo art collective, and Proceso Pentágono from Mexico. The comparative study of the work of these artists attests to a performative turn in Latin American art during the 1980s that, like photography and film before, recast the artistic field as a whole, changing the ways in which we perceive art and understand its role in society.