All text © 2019-2020 by authors
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written consent of the publisher or artist, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Alexandra Valdes
Interweaving projection with physical space mirrors the way concepts interact with the real world. Video projection introduces movement, rhythm, and montage to stationary, three-dimensional objects. At the same time, these objects provide weight and fixed form. This presentation invites the viewer to merge the tactile with the ephemeral, each informing and complicating the other in dialogue.
these destructive cycles lends urgency to exploring the history of how we got here, how we perceive what is going on, and the hard truths of those who must face the darkest parts of the
Thatpresent.urgency
All artwork © 2019-2020 by Edison Peñafiel
305.639.8247pieroatchugarry.comCatalogdesignedby
Edison Peñafiel is a South Florida based artist whose work examines experiences about those on the underside of the world’s major conflicts: the migrant, the laborer, the surveilled. Clashing ideologies and the repetitive cycles of history produce the human catastrophes that his multimedia installations speak to. He draws the eye to odd angles that our world often intersects at—using sculpture, photography, animation, video, and space to create disturbing reflections of the realities we participate in and witness every day. These unnerving views break us out of the desensitized lull that an ongoing crisis creates.
and import is always matched by emotional impact. For Peñafiel, the outcome of his work must bring a visceral change in the viewer, equal parts intriguing and unsettling. These confrontations with injustice through surreal imagery are conjured to produce what we need in the world today: empathy for the oppressed.
Cover Image by Luke Weiss
On view September 16 - November 14, 2020
Edison Peñafiel spent his youth in Ecuador and migrated to the United States in 2002. Since graduating from the Florida International University’s Fine Arts program in 2016, Peñafiel concentrated his practice on numerous large scale projects, site-specific, and immersive installations projects presented at The Bass Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, the Orlando Museum of Art, the Elsewhere Museum, the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the USF Contemporary Art Museum, the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Atchugar ry Art Center, among others. Notable awards include: the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Edison Peñafiel is represented by Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid.
Essays by Allison Klion, Jonathan Clark, Amy Galpin, and Christian Viveros-Fauné
Through visual references to German Expressionism and the surveillance state, Peñafiel keeps the work inside a longterm discussion about the turning gears of modernity and the alienation it continues to produce. This visual approach brims with anxiety illustrated in crooked lines, all informed by the dismal cruelties of bureaucracy, the policing of human movement, and empty rituals of labor. The hidden peril of
Copyright © 2020 by Edison Peñafiel Projects, LLC
Edison Pe ñafiel
Published in conjunction with the exhibition Land Escape (Paintings)
2 3LAND ESCAPE | EDISON PE ÑAFIEL ABOUT
Piero Atchugarry Gallery 5520 NE 4th Ave, Miami, FL 33137
Photography by Edison Peñafiel (unless otherwise noted)
Printed by MAD, Dania Beach, Florida
4 5LAND ESCAPE | EDISON PE ÑAFIEL PAINTINGS
If, like Cindy Sherman, Peñafiel has chosen to employ the uncanny effects of self-portraiture to inhabit each of the ten character studies he presents, he has done so chiefly to dramatize an ongoing mass evacuation of human beings that is projected to dwarf the 20th century’s Great Migration, the movement of 6 million African-Americans across the North American continent dramatized by artist Jacob Lawrence in his 60-panel masterpiece The Migration Series (1940-41). Where Sherman uses an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, and props for her various imagined characters, Peñafiel’s stripped-down impostures sport nondescript clothing (the better to avoid specific references) and traditional Latin American festive masks (which connect to both ideas of anonymity as well as ritual scapegoating). The fact that Peñafiel’s paintings are hung on facing walls and point in a single direction—toward the gallery’s glowing “Exit” sign— recalls the last panel of Lawrence’s celebrated series. Its caption reads simply: “And the migrants kept coming.”
Large-scale compositions that make non-hierarchical use of the disciplines of painting, photography, collage, and installation art, Peñafiel’s photo-based canvases extend the polymath artist’s efforts to relay one of this century’s most urgent narratives across multiple media. Inspired in no small part by the artist’s own experience as an immigrant to the U.S. from
masses—generational poverty, epochal flooding, economic stagnation, pandemics, political instability, mass migration—becomes the driving metaphor behind Peñafiel’s monumentally solitary subject.
“We stomp dangerously,” Bertrand Russell wrote in praise of Joseph Conrad’s skewering of Western exceptionalism in the novels Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, “on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into its fiery depths.” Russell’s words—written more than a half-century ago— echo furiously from the past while pointing an accusing finger at a much larger civilizational threat: the link between climate change and mass migration. Both are the subjects of American artist Edison Peñafiel’s latest installation. His fitting title for his ten colorful XL paintings of climate refugees penned in by barbed wire fencing arrayed around the walls of Piero Atchugarry Gallery: Land Escape.
Rendered as canvas-backed photographic images of first-world Americans (or Britons, Germans, Spaniards, Australians, et al) having metamorphosed into the Other, the exposure of the world’s consumer class to the miseries and deprivations of the planet’s survivalist
Pictured in black and white to recall, among other everyman antecedents, Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, and against loudly chromatic backgrounds to broadly suggest both actual landscapes and street art, these paintings portray masked figures engaged in a timeless yet desperately urgent modern pursuit: fleeing disaster into unknown exile.
To paraphrase David Wallace-Wells’ 2019 barnburner, The Uninhabitable Earth, the vast majority of the citizen-consumers inhabiting Western countries think of refugees as a failed state problem—that is, as socioeconomic fallout, the global South inflicts on the global North. But that view has been proven to be fake news by climate science and devastating new planetary weather patterns. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey produced at least 60,000 climate migrants in Texas and Hurricane Irma forced the evacuation of nearly 7 million people. By 2100, Wallace-Wells writes, “sea-level rise alone could displace 21 million Americans,” with many refugees coming “from the country’s southeast—chiefly Florida,” where 2.5 million are expected to be flooded out of the greater Miami area. Far from being a local problem for the governments of Guatemala, Venezuela, The Bahamas, or Cuba, the human cost of climate change has come due for the residents of Miami-Dade, Broward, Hillsborough, Palm Beach, and Pinellas counties.
No Escape: Edison Pe ñafiel’s Land Escape Paintings
6 7LAND ESCAPE | EDISON PE ÑAFIEL PAINTINGS isn’tjustithere,alreadyisfuture“Thedistributed.”evenlyGibson—William LAND ESCAPE – LADERA 2020 Acrylic house paint on canvas, print on archival cotton paper, wheatpaste9’x7’2”
8 9LAND ESCAPE | EDISON PE ÑAFIEL PAINTINGS LAND ESCAPE – DUNAS 2020
reflect their story, as well as that of millions of other families—from Sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia to Central America—who have fallen prey to “life after warming,” but with an important caveat. Absent certain key distinguishing geographical, ethnic, national and socioeconomic backstories, the figures animating the artist’s paintings are meant to stand in for us—The Walking Dead-inspired, post-apocalyptic version. Not for nothing do Peñafiel’s raffishly costumed players carry vintage luggage and resemble stock characters out of the plays of Samuel Beckett. Boiled down to their essential expression, Peñafiel’s canvases, like Lawrence’s panels (the African-American artist called his style “dynamic cubism”), also invoke certain generic characteristics associated with conventional landscape
What Peñafiel does in his Land Escape canvases is condense, concentrate and symbolically recast these imagination-defying events into paint and contemporary images. For the figures populating the artist’s Land Escape paintings, there is no escape. For the rest of us, Peñafiel’s artworks constitute a rough portrait of the lifestyle class running for their lives—it should serve as a dire warning or even a call to action.
Peñafiel’snorth.canvases
Christian Viveros-Fauné Brooklyn, 2020
house paint on canvas, print on archival cotton paper, wheatpaste9’x7’2”
Acrylic
Ecuador, his canvases simultaneously materialize and monumentalize forms, compositions, and scenarios he first displayed as large-scale video and photo installations in three separate instances in 2019. These were in Corsicana, Texas’ celebrated 100W residency; at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; and in a street-level installation on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach organized by The Bass Museum of Art. Epic views of an evolving human tragedy of transhistorical proportions, Peñafiel’s faceless cast of global down-and-out characters also serves as a chronicle of a profoundly personal story of precarious displacement, forced travel, and epochal insecurity. In the words of mathematician Eli Khamarov: “Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn’t commit.”
paintings while, alternately, frustrating others. Peñafiel’s canvases, for instance, sport an anthropomorphized orientation; that is to say, they are constructed vertically rather than horizontally with a view to underscoring the human drama of their calamitous narratives. Secondly, the artist uses geometric blocks of color to schematically describe the deracinated vistas he names in his paintings’ titles. Cerro (hill), for example, denotes a dun-colored diagonal area of flat paint with a sky-blue background; Pampa (prairie) two parallel zones of color laid horizontally one atop the other; Desierto (desert) an uninterrupted and uniform application of yellow paint; while Abyss denotes a cramped arrangement of blocks of dark color that literally crowd a dejected figure inside a tiny space. It’s not a stretch to say that that space resembles a cell.
Like Lawrence, Peñafiel is bent on arriving at a demotic set of forms that channel the tragedy that is mass migration during the Anthropocene, the geological epoch dominated by homo sapiens. For this purpose, he has distilled what amounts to one of the biggest events in recorded history into a set of recurring figures, vignettes, colors and geometric shapes. According to the ecotheorist Timothy Morton, part of what makes the idea of climate change and its associated effects, such as the displacement of millions of human beings around the globe, so difficult to comprehend is its sheer vastness—its facts are so overwhelming and complex that they can hardly be fully comprehended by historians, economists, geographers, demographers, anthropologists, and climate scientists.
That goes triple for an age that has so exacerbated global indigence that its natural byproducts—social, political, and economic insecurity, currently multiplied by climate instability and wealth disparity—have rapidly intensified what The New York Times recently termed, in a series of in-depth stories, “The Great Climate Migration.” For these articles, journalists Abraham Lustgarten and Meridith Kohut profiled an anonymous Guatemalan farming family devastated by the worsening weather pattern equivocally known as El Niño; predictably, drought, flood and bankruptcy forced them to liquidate their belongings and flee
LAND ESCAPE – CITY 2020
10 11LAND ESCAPE | EDISON PE ÑAFIEL PAINTINGS
wheatpaste9’x7’2”
LAND ESCAPE – DESIERTO 2020
Acrylic house paint on canvas, print on archival cotton paper, wheatpaste9’x7’2”
Acrylic house paint on canvas, print on archival cotton paper,
archival cotton paper, wheatpaste9’x7’2”
wheatpaste9’x7’2”
LAND ESCAPE – BEACH
Acrylic house paint on canvas, print on archival cotton paper,
2020
12 13LAND ESCAPE | EDISON PE ÑAFIEL PAINTINGS
LAND ESCAPE house paint on on
– ABYSS 2020 Acrylic
canvas, print
Acrylic
paper, wheatpaste9’x7’2”
LAND ESCAPE – LLANO 2020 Acrylic house paint on canvas, print on archival cotton paper, wheatpaste9’x7’2”
LAND ESCAPE – MARE 2020 house paint on canvas, print on archival cotton
14 15LAND ESCAPE | EDISON PE ÑAFIEL PAINTINGS
wheatpaste9’x7’2”
LAND ESCAPE – CERRO 2020
Acrylic house paint on canvas, print on archival cotton paper, wheatpaste9’x7’2”
16 17LAND ESCAPE | EDISON PE ÑAFIEL PAINTINGS
LAND ESCAPE – PAMPA 2020
Acrylic house paint on canvas, print on archival cotton paper,
Peñafiel’srelentlessly.installation occupies a room in 100W once used for secret rites and performances by the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows, including reenactments of Old Testament stories and the Royal Purple Degree—a highly theatrical ritual designed to gently shepherd blindfolded initiates through an elaborate mock pilgrimage to a High Priest, metaphorically representing their triumphant passage through the “journey of life.” 4 Great pains are taken by the Order, to assure that their candidates appear triumphant and remain safe during the entire ritual, despite loaded warnings of dire troubles ahead. 5 The pilgrims in the Royal Purple Degree, however, always complete their journey, victorious over vice and conveniently protected from the perils natural world. Peñafiel’s travelers have no oak tree of hospitality or “bright rainbow of promise” to remind them of their “covenant-keeping Father.” 6 Though there are no provisions against rough roads or annoyingly suspended rushes on their journey, Peñafiel’s travelers appear to walk on water.
18 19LAND ESCAPE | EDISON PE ÑAFIEL MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION
Finite Bodies in Infinite Time
ground transforms into water. Undoubtedly their bodies reveal their exhaustion, but each one—stooped old women and pigtailed children alike—drives onward
4
Independent Order of Odd Fellows., Revised Odd-fellowship Illustrated. The Complete Revised Ritual of the Lodge, Encampment a nd Rebekah Degrees, with the Secret “work” Added; Profusely Illustrated, by a past Grand Patriarch. With an Historical Sketch of t he Order, and an Introduction and Critical Analysis of the Character of Each Degree by President J. Blanchard of Wheaton College., 47th e d. (Chicago, IL: E.A. Cook, 1930), 248. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uva.x001476795 5 Odd Fellows, 254-6. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uva.x001476795 6 Odd Fellows, 259. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uva.x001476795 Excerpt from an essay by Allison Klion, ReenactmentsCuratorofaPerpetual Cycle exhibition at 100 West Artist and Writer residency, Corsicana, TX LAND ESCAPE – MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION 2019 Multichannel video, single-channel audio, chiffon fabric, barbed wire, 35’x60’x14’wood
Edison Peñafiel is (more) interested in the literal movement of bodies through space. His complex installation of video projections and collaged sound references recurrent patterns of human migrations. Looped in an endless procession, absurd, yet highly sympathetic characters trudge across an animated landscape. The terrain slowly shifts between grassland, ocean, desert, and mountain range, only for the travelers to appear back where they started again, looping back on an eternal journey to nowhere. Though Peñafiel’s masked characters continually traverse the landscapes they encounter, they leave no visible index of their passage, and as such, they seem doomed to repeat themselves again and again. At the same time, the identity of the characters remains temporally and culturally ambiguous—some seem without gender or without age. Papier-mâché masks primarily from artisans in Peñafiel’s native Ecuador, and unspecific costuming transform them into archetypal representatives of any diasporic population. The first wave of immigrants charts the path for the next, whose journey, in reality, might take a different shape, but the obstacles are largely the same. Though the characters rarely interact with each other, they seem to inherit some kind of spatial knowledge from their predecessors. There are no tentative steps no one hesitates as solid
2019 South Florida Cultural Consortium at exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami
Excerpt of writing by Amy Galpin Ph.D., Curator
20 21LAND ESCAPE | EDISON PE ÑAFIEL MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION
The notion of displacement figures prominently in Edison Peñafiel’s physically engulfing installations. Multiple projections and barbed wire surround the space. A visitor can consider their physical relationship to the masked figures, emoting an element of macabre, that move through the space. The subjects march, they process, but not for ceremonial purposes. Their migration is forced, and their actions evoke broad notions of displacement but also, most specifically, exile, exploitation, and prejudice. Born in Ecuador the artist has witnessed economic and political instability in South America. The artist recognizes the correlation between instability and migration and creates works that resonate with universal meanings as millions of people across the globe experience displacement. Peñafiel’s Land Escape
was recently produced at 100 W. Corsicana in Corsicana, Texas. Kyle Hobratschk, founder of the artist residency in Corsicana, writes “Land Escape pushed 100 West Corsicana’s third-floor studio in directions no other artist in this program has considered so deeply, stringing connections back to the nineteenth century theatrical origins of this residency building as an independent Order of the Odd Fellows Lodge, and doubling the utility of this space for both production and uncompromised exhibition platform. The window-blackened room evaporates the dimension of our 3rd-floor studio into timeless and timely content we are now pleased to see travel across state lines.”As Hobratschk infers, Land Escape makes its Miami debut in this exhibition.
Displacement
22 23LAND ESCAPE | EDISON PE ÑAFIEL MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION
Throughout history, humans have continually migrated between lands, territories, and nations. Today, legal boundaries, cultural resistance and public dialogue around immigration unfold across the world, yet personal narratives and first-hand histories are not often shared. Land Escape makes that journey visible within the Walgreens Windows with hopes of sparking dialogue and discussion around viewers’ own migration stories. While the imagery and narratives evoked here may be shared amongst communities, they are also quintessentially part of the artist’s personal story. The artist states that, “Through my work, open the dialogue on such issues by presenting different perspectives and aim to create empathy by denouncing injustice.”
Set against the Miami-inspired pastel backdrop and the surrounding urbanism, Land Escape depicts a caravan moving through an abstracted world created out of drawing, photography, and found objects. The scene bears witness to the act of humans walking, carrying, searching, and seeking. The rough, raw style of the figures is borrowed from early French cinema stark black and white contrast. These masked travelers— intentionally nonspecific—move through a space with no clear geography, set rules, or distinct path. Masks are used across cultures in similar ways: to provide disguise, entertainment or for religious practices. In Land Escape, these masks signify the anonymity of undocumented migrants, but also the struggle to adapt to a new culture.
24 25LAND ESCAPE | EDISON PE ÑAFIEL SITE-SPECIFIC INSTALLATION
LAND ESCAPE – SITE-SPECIFIC INSTALLATION 2019 Print of cotton paper, hardboard, barbed wire, acrylic house35’x60’x14’paint
Essay by Jonathan Clark Edited by Leilani Lynch
Edison Peñafiel’s work titled Land Escape was inspired by the artist’s personal experience as an immigrant to the United States. Born in Ecuador and having experienced immigration and the political and economic instability that often contribute to migration, Peñafiel felt it was his duty to explore his personal and collective experiences of displacement, which for millions of people around the world is also a daily reality. The installation in the Walgreens Windows—initially created during his time at an artist residency in Corsicana, Texas—is a site-specific extension of the original project. Now situated in Miami, the work has particular relevance to its residents, many of whom moved to the city from somewhere else.
Land Escape’s tableau echoes the Parthenon frieze—a scene of travel from antiquity—showing another cycle of human movement. The format of a store window display brings the journey of immigration parallel to the sidewalk, allowing viewers to participate and walk alongside the scene, separated by glass and barbed wire. The wire refers not only to the physical barriers, but also legal and political barriers that demarcate national borders around us. Importantly, the retail format situates the immigrant’s story where viewers would typically see new, desirable merchandise on display, highlighting the immigrant experience as the aspiration of some, but the lived experience of others.
Land Escape, 2019
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) is dedicated to making contemporary art accessible to diverse audiences— especially underserved populations—through the collection, preservation, and exhibition of the best of contemporary art and its art historical influences. The Museum expanded from the original Center of Contemporary Art, which was inaugurated in 1981 in a modest single gallery space. The Museum opened a new building in 1996 and remains in the same location to the present.
100 West Corsicana is an international residency for artists and writers, located in Corsicana, Texas. The building at 100 West is an ambitious studio environment balanced between large spaces, equipment, and small community, all composed within 11,000 square feet of an 1898 Odd Fellows Lodge in Downtown Corsicana, Texas.
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Walgreens Windows,
100 West Corsicana, Corsicana, Texas
Knight Foundation is a national foundation with strong local roots. We invest in journalism, in the arts, and in the success of cities where brothers John S. and James L. Knight once published newspapers. Our goal is to foster informed and engaged communities, which we believe are essential for a healthy democracy. For more, visit kf.org.
The South Florida Cultural Consortium
About
The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach
26 27LAND ESCAPE | EDISON PE ÑAFIEL INSTITUTIONS
Piero Atchugarry Gallery
Piero Atchugarry Gallery presents a contemporary art program and modern art survey. The gallery opened to the public in September 2013. By January 2014, the gallery moved to a large stable adapted as an exhibition space in Garzón, Uruguay. In December 2018, the program expanded to North America with a second location, a 9000 square feet warehouse on 5520 NE 4th Avenue in the Design District neighborhood. The participation of the gallery in what is a boiling art community that connects Europe, Latin America and both coasts of the United States represents the commitment of the program to support and present the work of local and international artists with an institutional approach.
Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami
The Walgreens Windows project space is graciously funded by Walgreens, in partnership with The Bass, and is sponsored in part by the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts, and Culture. Featuring emerging artists on a rotating basis, this collaboration furthers The Bass’ mission to present contemporary art to the surrounding community, in order to excite, challenge and educate. The Bass is Miami Beach’s contemporary art museum. Focusing on exhibitions of international contemporary art, The Bass presents mid-career and established artists reflecting the spirit and international character of Miami Beach. The exhibition program encompasses a wide range of media and artistic points of view that bring new thought to the diverse cultural context of Miami Beach.
The South Florida Cultural Consortium is a regional initiative in support of the arts governed by an Interlocal Agreement among the counties of Broward, Martin, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach. The Consortium’s members are the local arts agencies of these five counties, including the Broward County Cultural Division, the Arts Council of Martin County, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Keys Council of the Arts, and the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County. The Consortium works to foster cooperation across the South Florida region to help develop and promote the work of cultural organizations and artists and the audiences that they serve.
for STPI—Creative Workshop in Singapore, ArtTable and ICOM, as well as served on juries for Oolite Arts in Florida, The Hopper Prize, and Apexart in New York. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in the History of Art from University of California, Berkeley, with an emphasis in modern and contemporary art.
Christian Viveros-Fauné is a New York-based writer and curator, ex-art dealer and ex-art fair director (art fairs VOLTA and NEXT). He has lectured at Yale University, Pratt Institute, and Parsons School of Design, as well as being a Visiting Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design and Holland’s Rietveld Academie. A collection of his criticism, Greatest Hits: Arte en Nueva York 2001–2011, was published in 2012, and Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art was published by David Zwirner Books in 2018. Also, in 2018, it was announced by the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum that ViverosFauné will be the ‘curator-at-large’. Simultaneously, he was the Kennedy Family Visiting Scholar at the USF School of Art and Art History during 2018–19. As a writer, he has published in, among other venues, Art in America, Art in Australia, Artnet, Artnews, ArtNexus, Art Papers, Art Review, The Baffler, Departures Magazine, El Mercurio (Chile), Frieze, Lapiz (Spain), La Tercera (Chile), Life & Style (Mexico), Newsweek, Quien (Mexico), The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily and The Village Voice (for which he was the weekly art critic between 2007-2016).
Leilani Lynch is Curator at The Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, FL. She has recently curated and coorganized exhibitions with Haegue Yang, Lara Favaretto, Mika Rottenberg, Karen Rifas and Aaron Curry, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Laure Prouvost, and Paola Pivi. Her curatorial practice champions experimentation and critical engagement with contemporary issues. Working collaboratively with artists, she organizes exhibitions and programs that analyze the human experience and are inclusive of diverse and wide-ranging audiences. Originally from San Francisco, Lynch relocated to Miami for an Art Table Summer Mentored Internship at The Bass, eventually joining the staff. Before rejoining in 2015, she produced site-specific experimental exhibitions with international artists at Locust Projects in Miami. Lynch has recently participated in panels and lectures
Amy Galpin is Chief Curator, Frost Art Museum at Florida International University. Prior to Frost Art Museum, she was curator at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College. Galpin’s curatorial trajectory has primarily focused on modern and contemporary work created in the U.S. and Latin America. She also served as Associate Curator of Art of the Americas at the San Diego Museum of Art and has curated exhibitions at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago and the Pasadena Museum of California Art. Galpin received an MA in Latin American Studies from San Diego State University and a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Illinois-Chicago.
28 29LAND ESCAPE | EDISON PE ÑAFIEL INSTITUTIONS
Christian Viveros-Fauné
Amy Galpin
Leilani Lynch
Valeria Guillén
Cast Edison PintoNathaliePeñafielAlfonsoBean
Land Escape Exhibitions
Production
Special Thanks To Amy Galpin, Leilani Lynch, Christian Viveros-Fauné, Chana Sheldon, Allison Klion, Amanda Sanfilipo, Erica Mohan, Phillip Dunlap, Adam Ganuza, Marc Aptakin, Lourdes Morrison, Luke Weiss, Alexandra Valdes, Piero Atchugarry, Angie Gonzales, Betty McGhee, Sila Caufman, Adrian Campbell, Kyle Hobratschk, Nancy Rebal, David Searcy, Adrianne Lichliter, Sofia Bastidas Vivar, Rachel Wolfson-Smith, Kevin Arrow, Alexander Garcia, Dainy Tapia,
All other images courtesy of Edison Peñafiel Projects, LLC
Land Escape site-specific installation was commissioned by The Bass Museum and Walgreens for their Walgreens Windows project space.
Nathalie Alfonso
PJ RamiroMills Ortiz Samuel Cortez
Sabrina Amrani Gallery
The Bass Museum
Marketing & Programing Dainy Tapia – ArtSeen365
USF Contemporary Art Museum MoCA North Miami
Acknowledgments
Gina Diaz
Raymond Ghaly, Aurora Molina, Juana Valdez, Carolina Cueva, Jahaira Rios Campos y Galvez, Diego Rodriguez, Ramiro Ortiz, Sonia Vera Robles, Natali Peñafiel, Ivanna Suarez, Brian Suarez, Samuel Cortez, Doug McCraw, Tayina Deravile, Peter Simons, Leah Brown, Jessy Adisson, Valeria Guillén, Jon Millan, Jesus Petroccini, Nathalie Alfonso, Sabrina Amrani, Jal Hamad.
Piero Atchugarry Gallery MADArtSeen365
Land Escape – Multimedia Installation Reenactments of a Perpetual Cycle, 2019 100W Corsicana, Corsicana, Texas
Broward County Cultural Division
Warehouse Living Arts Center Theatre
100W Corsicana Artist and Writers NavarroResidencyCouncil for the Arts
No Escape: Edison Peñafiel’s Land Escape Paintings by Christian Viveros-Fauné
– Walgreens Windows, Miami Beach, Florida
Land Escape – Multimedia Installation South Florida Cultural Consortium, 2019 Curated by Amy Galpin Ph.D. Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Florida
Curated by Christian Viveros-Fauné USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, LandFloridaEscape - Paintings
Edison Peñafiel
Land Escape paintings production, exhibition, and programming is made possible with the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts FundingChallenge.forLand Escape paintings is provided in part by the Broward County Board of County Commissioners as recommended by the Broward Cultural Council and Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau.
Institutional Support by Knight Foundation Miami FoundationFoundationforContemporary Arts
Land Escape – Site-specific Installation Land Escape, 2019 Organized by Leilani Lynch Commissioned by The Bass Museum and TheWalgreensBassMuseum
Sonia Vera Robles
Essays
Infinite Bodies in Infinite Time by Allison Klion
Land Escape – Virtual Exhibition Life During Wartime: Art in the Age of Coronavirus, 2020
MAD
Image Credits (Page 24) Land Escape at the Bass Museum Walgreens Windows Photography by Zachary Balber, courtesy of The Bass.
30 31LAND ESCAPE | EDISON PE ÑAFIEL CREDITS
South Florida Cultural Consortium, Displacement by Amy Galpin Ph.D.
Land Escape, 2020 Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami, Florida
Land Escape by Jonathan Clark, Edited by Leilani Lynch
FATVillage Arts District
