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"Bonansinga, Kate"
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Curating at the Edge
Located less than a mile from Juárez, the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso is a non-collecting institution that serves the Paso del Norte region. In Curating at the Edge, Kate Bonansinga brings to life her experiences as the Rubin’s founding director, giving voice to a curatorial approach that reaches far beyond the limited scope of “border art\" or Chicano art. Instead, Bonansinga captures the creative climate of 2004–2011, when contemporary art addressed broad notions of destruction and transformation, irony and subversion, gender and identity, and the impact of location on politics. The Rubin’s location in the Chihuahuan desert on the U.S./Mexican border is meaningful and intriguing to many artists, and, consequently, Curating at the Edge describes the multiple artistic perspectives conveyed in the place-based exhibitions Bonansinga oversaw. Exciting mid-career artists featured in this collection of case studies include Margarita Cabrera, Liz Cohen, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and many others. Recalling her experiences in vivid, first-person scenes, Bonansinga reveals the processes a contemporary art curator undertakes and the challenges she faces by describing a few of the more than sixty exhibitions that she organized during her tenure at the Rubin. She also explores the artists’ working methods and the relationship between their work and their personal and professional histories (some are Mexican citizens, some are U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, and some have ancestral ties to Europe). Timely and illuminating, Curating at the Edge sheds light on the work of the interlocutors who connect artists and their audiences.
eBook
Atherton | Keener
In early August 2010, I marked the halfway point on the twelve-hour drive from Los Angeles to El Paso with a stop for a bite to eat and a quick visit to the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, just a few miles from Phoenix. Unexpected pleasures mark my memory of that reprieve from the road: a lunch of mozzarella and tomato on thick sourdough and 90 Days Over 100° by Atherton|Keener, an exhibition by artists-trained-as-architects Jay Atherton and Cy Keener. The walls of the hallway leading to the gallery supported text about the extreme heat and dryness in the Phoenix
Book Chapter
Adrian Esparza
I met Adrian Esparza in 2002, two years after his return to El Paso from the Los Angeles area, where he had earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at California Institute of the Arts. He is large in stature, soft spoken, and thoughtful, with a wide face and gentle manner. “Growing up in El Paso, I had little exposure to historical art,” he told me later.¹ “My first exposure was through craft. Early memories include manipulating Popsicle sticks, carving balsa wood . . . seeing my mother sew. . . . Craft laid the foundation for the formal issues that I would later
Book Chapter
Margarita Cabrera
When I first met Margarita Cabrera in 2001, she was experimenting with making impressions of teeth and presenting them as sculpture. Her work, titled Piled Up Tension Along the Rio Grande, implied dental records as a method for identifying a corpse when the rest of the body was unrecognizable, usually due to a brutal death. At the time, Cabrera was artist-in-residence at the Border Art Residency in La Union, New Mexico, which is about a twenty-minute drive northwest of El Paso. Born in Monterrey, Mexico, and raised in Mexico City, Cabrera moved to Salt Lake City at the age of
Book Chapter
Nicola Lopez, Noah MacDonald, Julio César Morales, Leo Villareal, and Vargas Suarez UNIVERSAL
My introduction to the art of Leo Villareal represented the beginning of one of the more complicated and conceptually fraught exhibitions I have ever organized. That exhibition would come to be titled Claiming Space: Mexican Americans in U.S. Cities. Susan Harrison introduced me to Villareal’s work in 2002, when she was based in Washington, D.C., as an administrator at the Art in Architecture program for the General Services Administration, overseeing the commissioning of art for newly constructed federal buildings. The architectural design competition for the courthouse in El Paso was underway and ½ of 1 percent of the construction budget
Book Chapter
SIMPARCH
It was June 1999, mid-morning, the day already ablaze, and I was sitting on the front porch of the home of sculptor Rachel Stevens in a downtown neighborhood of Las Cruces, New Mexico, which is about forty-five miles west of El Paso. Las Cruces is sometimes portrayed to be like a picture postcard of the scenic Southwest, but most of the town is grittier. The landscape is dotted with small strip malls. Vacant lots of creosote and mesquite are decorated with plastic bags that become tangled in these desert plants during frequent windstorms.
Stevens’s friend Matt Lynch appeared unannounced: tall,
Book Chapter
Alejandro Almanza Pereda
The room is rough, with a concrete floor, exposed brick walls, dark steel posts, and a raw wood ceiling—relatively standard fare when it comes to exhibition spaces for contemporary art. It is one of the galleries in the Soap Factory, a historic soap manufacturing plant that was repurposed to be an art exhibition venue in Minneapolis, Minnesota. What makes it unusual is that the furniture there seems inexplicably to float. Tables, a desk, fluorescent and incandescent lightbulbs, a lamp, an upended couch, lumber, cinder blocks, and draped extension cords are suspended in space and appear to be disconnected from
Book Chapter
Introduction
This is a book about some extraordinary artists. I have come to know and respect each of them in my role as a contemporary art curator. It is also a book about curatorial decision making. It is meant for artists, art lovers, museumgoers, students of curatorial practices and museum studies, and anyone else who wants to better understand how contemporary art curators operate. I offer a peek behind the scenes: institutional mission, timing, finances, coordination, personalities, and taste are important considerations in this work. I also interpret and contextualize the artworks discussed, which is an important curatorial task. In 1999,
Book Chapter