SITE Santa Fe is pleased to present SITElines.2016 opening on July 16, 2016. This exhibition is the second installment in SITE Santa Fe’s reimagined biennial series with a focus on contemporary art from the Americas and features over 30 artists from 16 countries and 11 new commissions organized around intersecting ideas brought together by a team of five curators−Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, Kathleen Ash-Milby, Pip Day, Pablo León de la Barra, and Kiki Mazzucchelli.
This year’s biennial, entitled much wider than a line, is an articulation of the interconnectedness of the Americas and various shared experiences such as the recognition of colonial legacies, expressions of the vernacular, the influence of indigenous understandings, and our relationship to the land.
Paolo Soleri Theater, c. 1975, Courtesy of the Institute of American Indian Arts Archives, Santa Fe, NM.
much wider than a line takes its title from Leanne Simpson’s, Dancing on our Turtle’s Back, a book about life ways of Nishnaabeg people. In her accounts of non-colonial conceptions of nationhood and sovereignty, it is the joint care taking required in the overlapping territorial boundaries between one Indigenous nation and another that are traditionally relationship-building. The relationships that emerge are, like the borders themselves, much wider than a line.
The organizing principles of the exhibition take their cue from the remarkable amphitheater structure in Santa Fe designed by the architect Paolo Soleri. Commissioned in the 1960s by Lloyd Kiva New, then Arts Director of the newly founded Institute of American Indian Arts, the Paolo Soleri Amphitheater was originally built to support their groundbreaking curricula in contemporary American Indian drama. The organic concrete building drew on principles of Native American design, and was host to extraordinary performances of American Indian Theater that bridged cultures and histories. The amphitheater was completed in 1970 on the campus of the Santa Fe Indian School (established in 1890 to assimilate Native American children from tribes throughout the Southwestern United States). Today, the structure stands empty, derelict, and is very much a contested site. The amphitheater represents both a historically potent forum for the exploration of collaborative cross-cultural processes and a stand-in for complexities of geopolitical tensions that presently exist in the region and throughout the Americas.
Key thematic threads explored in much wider than a line include:
- Vernacular Strategies The importance of vernacular sources− in design, architecture, textiles, and technique− that influence the work of artists throughout the Americas.
- Indigenous Understandings Performance, ritual, histories, and materials drawn from indigenous sources, as they relate to the natural world.
- Shared Territories The complexity of networks and affinities in the Americas through questions around identity, race, borders, and emerging de-colonial practices.
Participating artists include:
Xenobia Bailey (b. 1955 Seattle, Washington; lives and works in New York)
Lina Bo Bardi (b. 1914 Rome, Italy; d. 1992 São Paulo, Brazil)
Margarita Cabrera (b. 1973 Monterrey, Mexico; lives in El Paso, Texas)
Raven Chacon (b. 1977 Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, Arizona, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Benvenuto Chavajay (b. 1978 Guatemala City; lives in Guatemala City)
Mariana Castillo Deball (b. 1975 Mexico City, Mexico; lives in Berlin)
Lewis deSoto (b. 1954 San Bernardino, California; lives in Napa, California)
Aaron Dysart (b. 1975 Minneapolis, Minnesota; lives in St. Paul, Minnesota)
Carla Fernández (b.1973 Saltillo, Mexico, lives in Mexico City)
Miguel Gandert (b. 1956 Espanola, New Mexico; lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972 Colorado; lives in Hudson, New York)
Jorge González (b. San Juan, Puerto Rico; lives in San Juan)
Maria Hupfield (b. 1975 Georgian Bay, Ontario, Canada; lives in New York)
Graciela Iturbide (b. 1942 Mexico City; lives in Mexico City)
Zacharias Kunuk (b. 1957 in Kapuivik, Nunavut, Canada; lives in Igloolik, Nunavut, Canada)
David Lamelas (b. 1946 in Buenos Aires; lives in Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and Paris)
Marta Minujin (b. 1943 Buenos Aires, lives in in Buenos Aires)
Paulo Nazareth (b. 1977 Governador Valadares, Brazil; lives in favela do Palmital in Santa Luzia, Belo Horizonte)
Rometti Costales (Julia Rometti: b. 1975 Nice, France; Victor Costales: b. 1974 Minsk, Belarus; began collaborating in 2007; they live in Paris)
Abel Rodríguez (b.1943 Nonyuya Community, Colombia)
Tanya Tagaq (b. 1977 in Cambridge Bay, Canada; lives in Canada)
Javier Téllez (b. 1969 Valencia, Venezuela; lives in New York)
Juana Valdes (b. Cabañas, Pinar Del Rio, Cuba; lives in Miami)
Pierre Verger (b. 1902 in Paris, France; d. 1996 in Salvador, Brazil)
Erika Verzutti (b. São Paulo, 1971; lives and works in São Paulo)
Work by Xenobia Bailey. Photo by Jeffrey Machtig of John Michael Art Center 2009.
New artist commissions include:
Jonathas De Andrade (b. 1982 Maceió, Brazil; lives in Recife, Brazil)
Jonathas De Andrade creates works that reenact ethnographic experiments to ask questions about perception and relation, and how ideas of culture and society are constructed in the popular imagination. Instead of creating consensus, these experiments, derived from the 1952 report from UNESCO, Race and Class in Rural Brazil, explore the radical specificity of individual lives and local cultures. De Andrade will work with locals in Santa Fe to create a new work in this ongoing exploration.
Anna Boghiguian (b. 1946 in Cairo, Egypt)
Anna Boghiguian’s drawings, objects, poetry and prose operate both as reflections on the geopolitical conditions in which the people she encounters live, and as documents of the liminal spaces of the cities that she travels through. Boghiguian will be in residence for a month during the summer to create her new work for much wider than a line based on research of the cotton trade.
Sonya Kelliher-Combs (b. 1969 Bethel, Alaska; lives in Anchorage, Alaska)
Sonya Kelliher-Combs has used walrus gut, human hair, animal fur, and the approximations of hide and skin created from translucent layers of acrylic polymer. For the exhibition she will create a new room size installation that evokes both centuries old Inupiaq cultural practices and the play of personal iconographies.
William Cordova (b. 1971 Lima, Peru; lives in Miami/New York/Lima)
William Cordova presents yawar mallku: sculpting in time, a project focused on analyzing/merging the intersectionality between architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s transcendentalist influenced values and those of Andean, Japanese, Pueblo and Aztec cultures. Through this work, the artist reveals common strategies subsequently applied by late 1960s and early 1970s young radical activist organizations including the Young Lords, Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, and I Wor Kuen, among others.
Jorge González (b. San Juan, Puerto Rico; lives in San Juan)
Working with local weavers in various regions, Jorge González creates hand-made portable stools that celebrate the vernacular. These stools play a functional and aesthetic role in cultural spaces. For this exhibition, Gonzalez
will create a series of new stools that will be encountered and used throughout the exhibition.
Maria Hupfield (b. 1975 Georgian Bay, Ontario, Canada; lives in New York)
Hupfield’s new installation and performance, It is Never Just about Sustenance or Pleasure, explores the contrasts between objects made for wetlands activated within a desert environment. Worn by the artist in a performance, the felt mittens and boots are large and awkward, suggesting a dissonance between the wearer and reality. Within the installation, these items, displayed on plain 2 x 4’ boards in a spare corner of the gallery, are further estranged from their function as protection from cold air and water.
Rometti Costales (Julia Rometti: b. 1975 Nice, France; Victor Costales: b. 1974 Minsk, Belarus; began collaborating in 2007; they live in Paris)
For collaborators Julia Rometti and Victor Costales, nature is a space for political inscription. Rometti and Costales will be in residence in Santa Fe in the spring to create a new narrative work responding to their research about the region.
Research and Archival Contributions by:
Margaret Randall
Albuquerque-based feminist poet and activist Margaret Randall presents an installation of El Corno Emplumado, a revolutionary bi-lingual literary journal that she co-founded and co-edited in Mexico City in the 1960s.
Conrad Skinner
Santa Fe-based architect and writer Conrad Skinner contributes to an installation that pays homage to the architecture, history, and impact of the Paolo Soleri Amphitheater and the Indian Theater movement at the Institute of American Indian Arts, which commissioned this significant landmark.
SITE Center Community-Based Projects:
Pablo Helguera (b. 1971 Mexico City; lives in New York) SITE Center artist-in-residence will continue the long-term project that he began in 2014 as part of the previous SITElines biennial Unsettled Landscapes.
Francisca Benitez (b. 1974, Santiago, Chile; lives in New York) will present a new community-based project in collaboration with the New Mexico School for the Deaf.
Raven Chacon (b. 1977 in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, AZ; lives in Albuquerque) will conduct workshops for young composers and student musicians of the Santa Fe Indian School and stage a concert.
Catalogue:
much wider than a line will be accompanied by a catalogue focusing on artists, artworks, and the curatorial underpinnings of the exhibition.
much wider than a line curatorial team.
much wider than a line Curatorial Team
Rocío Aranda-Alvarado (b. Santiago, Chile; lives in New York)
Kathleen Ash-Milby (b. Albuquerque, New Mexico; lives in New Jersey)
Pip Day (b. Chelmsford, UK; lives in Montréal and Mexico City)
Pablo León de la Barra (b. Mexico City; lives in London and Rio de Janeiro)
Kiki Mazzucchelli (b. São Paulo; lives in London)
SITElines Team
Irene Hofmann, Phillips Director and Chief Curator, SITE Santa Fe
Candice Hopkins, Managing Curator
Brandee Caoba, Curatorial Assistant
Joanne Lefrak, SITEcenter Director
The SITElines.2016 team’s approach foregrounds curatorial collaboration, the integration of multiple art histories, and the exploration of points of convergence and divergence amongst artists working across the Americas.
much wider than a line Curatorial Team Biographies
Rocío Aranda-Alvarado (b. Santiago, Chile; lives in New York)
Rocío Aranda-Alvarado has held curatorial positions at El Museo del Barrio in New York since 2009. Her curatorial work and research focuses on modern and contemporary art of the Americas. She is currently working on A Brief History of (Some) Things, an exhibition exploring the persistence of pre-Hispanic imagery in contemporary art. She recently organized MUSEUM STARTER KIT: Open With Care, celebrating the 45th anniversary of El Museo, and LA BIENAL 2013, El Museo’s biennial of emerging artists, and permanent collection exhibitions for 2012-14. She is the former curator of the Jersey City Museum, where she organized significant retrospective exhibitions of the work of Chakaia Booker (2004) and Raphael Montañez Ortiz (2006) and group shows on various themes including Tropicalisms: Subversions of Paradise (2006), The Superfly Effect (2004), and The Feminine Mystique (2007). Born in Santiago, Chile, Aranda-Alvarado received degrees in Art History from the University of Maryland, Tulane University and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Kathleen Ash-Milby (b. Albuquerque, New Mexico; lives in New Jersey)
Kathleen Ash-Milby is an Associate Curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in New York. She organized numerous contemporary art exhibitions at the museum including Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist (2015) co-organized with David Penney, C.Maxx Stevens: House of Memory (2012), Hide: Skin as Material and Metaphor (2010)and Off the Map: Landscape in the Native Imagination (2007). She was the co-curator, with Truman Lowe, for Edgar Heap of Birds: Most Serene Republics, a public art installation and collateral project for the 52nd International Art Exhibition / Venice Biennale (2007). She was the curator and co-director of the American Indian Community House Gallery in New York City from 2000–2005. A member of the Navajo Nation, she earned her master of arts from the University of New Mexico in Native American art history.
Pip Day (b. Chelmsford, UK; lives in Montréal and Mexico City)
Pip Day has been Director/Curator at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art in Montréal since 2012. At SBC she initiated the long-term research-based Focus Program on the topic of Sovereignty, research supported by her Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship for Not I: The Performative Speech Act and the Sovereign Subject. Prior to this, Day worked as an independent curator, writer and educator in the arts for 12 years, primarily in Mexico City. There she founded the first graduate level curatorial studies program in Latin America; RIM, a residency program for curators and critics; and el instituto, an organization dedicated to culture, politics, activism and research, generating exhibitions and events such as Spatial Practices in Revolution and Talk Show. Prior to this she worked as Curator at Artists Space in New York. Day obtained her B.A. in Art History from University of Toronto and her M.A. in Curatorial Studies from Bard College.
Pablo León de la Barra (b. Mexico City; lives in Rio de Janeiro)
Pablo León de la Barra is currently the Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator Latin America at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. From 2015-2016, he served as Director of Casa França Brasil in Rio de Janeiro. He has curated, among other exhibitions, To Be Political it Has to Look Nice (2003) at apexart and Art in General in New York; PR04 Biennale (2004, co-curator) in Puerto Rico; Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan and Elsewhere (2011) at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Bananas is my Business: the Southamerican Way (2011, co-curated with Julieta Gonzalez) at Museu Carmen Miranda, Rio de Janeiro; Bienal Tropical (2011) in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today (2014-15) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Museo Jumex in Mexico City. León de la Barra has written for various publications, participated in numerous international symposiums and conferences and is editor of his blog the Centre for the Aesthetic Revolution. In 2012 he was awarded the first Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and Independent Curators International Travel Award for Central America and the Caribbean in honor of Virginia Pérez-Ratton. He holds a PhD in History and Theories from the Architectural Association, London.
Kiki Mazzucchelli (b. São Paulo; lives in London)
Kiki Mazzucchelli is an independent curator and writer working between London and São Paulo. Mazzucchelli was the curator of the two-part show Mythologies and Mythologies by Proxy at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris in 2011 and at the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo in 2013 (co-curated with Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes). Other recent curatorial projects include Beyond the Avant-Garde/ Bienal Naïfs do Brasil (SESC Piracicaba, 2012) and the series of radio programmes OIDARADIO Conversations developed for the 30th São Paulo Bienal with Mobile Radio and Resonance.fm (2012). Recent publications include “The São Paulo Biennial and the Rise of Contemporary Brazilian Art” (In Contemporary Art Brazil, ed. Hossein Amirsadegui and Catherine Petitgas, London: Transglobe, 2012) and a chapter on the São Paulo art scene in the publication Avant-Gardes of the 21st Century (London: Phaidon, 2013).
She holds an MA in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College and is currently a PhD candidate at TrAIN (University of the Arts) researching exhibition histories with a focus on Brazilian art.
For more information, visit the SITE Santa Fe website here.