Arnaldo Roche Rabell - "The Blue of Ruins"

The Blue of Ruins

Arnaldo Roche Rabell

Cover Image: DO YOU KNOW WHERE THE ALMITHY DWELLS? 2005 Mix Media 144” x 300”

The Blue of Ruins Arnaldo Roche Rabell

This exhibit at Point of Contact Gallery in Syracuse, New York is made possible thanks to the generous support of The College of Arts and Sciences, and the Coalition of Museums and Art Centers at Syracuse University.

The Blue of Ruins / Arnaldo Roche Rabell Lilliana Ramos Collado, Ph.D. Curator

Puerto Rican artist Arnaldo Roche Rabell is best known for his use of techniques whereby “painting” becomes a complex battle between image and method, between the artist’s own bodywork and the end product. Every instance of production leaves an indelible mark on each artwork, the material reference to the very process of making art. Process and image are impossible to tell apart, thus inviting the viewer to retrace the artist’s own movements, to see, and probably feel, the artist’s train of thought fleshed out in the work. The violence of his techniques —frottage and grattage—, and of his more recent — and aggressive— “brush drawings” tell us about the falling apart of self and world.

Blue: an archaeology Until 2007, Roche Rabell’s mainly narrative images had been characterized by an explosive polychromy.

His dense surfaces rich in oil applied generously with diverse methods produced a baroque image wherein the artist undertook a complex exploration of his own self and identity. His new “blue period” in many ways proclaims the emphatic restatement of his former identity project, and by using innovative and stronger processes, the artist has embraced a new materiality that showcases the demise of matter itself.

Roche Rabell’s blue has its own story. First of all, it expresses a lean austerity that clashes against his

former prominence of color and contrast, although this somber austerity of blue is, in a way, contradicted by the extremely large paper frottages and grattages.

His careful and lavish approach to color has given way to a fast-paced, aggressive attack on the pictorial surface whose complexity as to image building has left behind more traditional allegories of the self to become strictly literal renditions of self and object: painting has become touching, applying oil has turned into carving oil out and away of the pictorial surface.

Roche’s first frottages date back to 1982. Most were made in red and showed “exploded” corpulent bodies. This “red” stage culminated in his extraordinary The Sacrifice (1987), a red frottage still-life that presents, on a plate at a fully dressed dinner table, the artist’s severed head with his eyes wide open looking at the viewer. Roche’s own hands, frottaged on the pictorial surface, come in from the left and the right of the image wielding forks and knives to probably feed on his own head. Meanwhile, also in 1987, he had worked on his Once Again the Blind Man Asks Himself if There is Anybody Out There, a grattage, another still-life where a blind man ran into a dining room with his hands outstretched unaware that, on a table, there laid a Christ figure holding a mirror. All the objects presented had been grattaged on the surface composing a negative image, just as in The Sacrifice. I propose that these two powerful images are the harbingers of Roche’s new blue: the blue of

sacrifice, pain, turmoil, catastrophe, or as the artist himself once told me, the “toxic blue” of death and destruction. It is important to note that, as far back as 1987, Roche had already chosen black over red.

And this black eventually became the toxic blue with which he would feed his frottages and grattages, all made by means of touching a surface to bring out a literal image of what was below the pictorial surface.

Thus, Roche’s blue comes along with techniques that are quite different from painting with a brush on a surface, new ways of using touch with violence and speed to bring to the surface an underground image.

In his blue works, the image buried under the material —paper, in this case—, bears witness to a body that cannot be seen with the eyes, but sensed with the hands. As Immanuel Kant said, among the five senses, only touch can ensure the reality of an object as res extensa, give account of its truthful being. The exclusive use of blue emphasizes in turn the minimalism of drawing, its flattened existence, it’s being just the trace of the object that is actually absent and just present because of this marking on paper. Gone are perspective, realism, thickness, flesh. The blue works just record form, not life, always as a negative image as in a photograph, but made with the artist’s very hands through modeling. The model’s body becomes a modeled image. Painting becomes drawing.

I STILL BREATHING, 2014 Mix Media On Paper 32” x 26”

Selfland, or The Portrait in Ruins It is often said that the self-portrait is just a particular mode of the portrait where the artist represents him or herself. I venture a different opinion: the self-portrait conveys not only a representation of the artist: it also foregrounds his or her style because, to quote Buffon’s famous phrase, “le style c’est l’homme” or “style is the man”. When an artist paints a portrait, it is someone’s semblance following the style of the artists, but when the artist paints him or herself, the final work showcases his style —not his semblance—, his signature, his manner of painting: the face becomes the place where personal style itself becomes the subject of the artwork. Self-portraits —as Rembrandt’s, as Vincent van Gogh’s, as Lucian Freud’s— are theoretical statements, arguments on the what and the why of his or her art. The self-portrait does not have to do with holding a mirror up to one’s face, but with presenting the subjective and very own manner of the artist.

In the last few years, Roche has grattaged and frottaged himself often, and has used his own likeness as a mainstay on most of his blue works. This is not new.

Since his earliest works, Roche has used the self-portrait to comment on his own life, on the political plight of Puerto Rico, and on the present situation of the world.

He has projected his persona on his art by extending the self-portrait to his still lifes and landscapes. For example, in 2009, upon reading a special report to the President of the United States indicating that, according to law, the US Congress retained all powers on the People of Puerto Rico, save for “matters of

purely local concern”, the artist became aware of the extreme frailty of public and private property on our island, he hired a truck, took all his furniture and belongings to his studio, put them on the floor faceup, and grattaged them on a huge paper. Along the border to the paper, he also grattaged a strong rope that functioned as a frame but that also “tied” all his things together.

This work, titled The Pursuit of Happiness (2009) is a lifesize still-life, actually a vanitas, where the artist’s most beloved and precious objects take the place of his likeness —those things that reveal and contain and expose his personality— thus becoming a symbolic self-portrait. The still life and the self-portrait merge to denounce the political power of the US Congress upon the bodies and the property of all Puerto Ricans on the island. In order to keep his belongings secure, the artist decided to store them in a work of art that will always be his, also by force of another federal act: the Copyright Law. It bears noting that Roche’s preference for the selfportrait and the still life have much to do with his view of the world and the subject-object-world relationship, as I have proposed in previous essays and comments1.

In fact, the present exhibition at the Point of Contact Gallery is almost completely focused to the selfportrait.

DISTANT SHORES, 2014 Mix Media On Paper 84” x 84”

Why this emphasis in the depiction of the self in Roche’s work throughout his career? From the start, Roche has used the self-portrait to question his dasein, his manner of being there in the world. Wielding a highly political stand indispensable to fully understand his métier, he has explored how Puerto Rico’s political situation has in many ways perverted our individual and collective life. Being a deeply religious person, the presence of the divine is also a determinant of many of his images, with strong reference to well-known Christian iconography, restated from the point of view of his political persuasion. God’s absence or inexistence is a constant question in many of the blue works, as a desperate call for a solution to the destruction of the island’s habitat, population and future, always insisting on the fact that there is nothing we can call ours. The self, as presented in the self-portraits, is a suffering subject, made of stains and splinters, in turmoil, a face we have to make out from parts that seem not to come together in a single, restful image.

In the first series of works from 2014 placed on the east wall of the main gallery at Point of Contact —The Achitect, Rest, Illuminated, Kingdomless, The Barge, The Stairs, The Wish, Still Breathing, and Memory—, the artists conveys what can be described as a loss of the face: the blue stain with of haphazard details is given form by superimposing splinters of balsa wood: those splinters mark the eyes, the mouth, the nose, the jaw, the forehead, as it were necessary to retrieve all facial features that have lost their shape, as if the face had

needed an archaeological process to fill in the blanks of a face that has lost its distinctive human features.

The splinters themselves seem like debris, as if the wood had been shredded by an explosion. Some of the images bear a symbolic form on the forehead: a wooden triangle, a barge, a rose, a wooden square, as if the mind could still have thoughts that can only be represented by material shapes also made of splinters. There is irony implicit in a shapeless face that can only retrieve some of its features because of these splinters, as if the explosion could give the subject its face back, but made of what has stuck upon the face and masked it in wood. The fact that this is balsa wood, soft and fragile, used for making architectural models, points to the ultimate fragility of The Face as a site of identity and selfhood. Whatever is left of the mind after this reiterated state of perpetual explosion that seems to hit the artist-as-subject once and again has the relentless effect of obliterating any hope for a wholesome self. Memory, shown as a rose made of balsa wood and pasted to the artist’s forehead, is, more than ever, an ephemeral flower destined to whither and die.

It is important to stress that this is a series of self-portraits where, once and again, we see the face because it is modeled by splinters, a face that keeps changing under repeated abuse by forces unknown and only visible by their distorting effects on the face. In a series, as László Moholy-Nagy reminds us2 , all its members share a narrative, a form, or a development, and this

From left to right, top to bottom: THE STAIRS, THE ARCHITECT, THE WISH, THE REST, and THE BARGE 2014 Mix Media On Paper 32” x 26”

forces the viewer to analyze each item together with the rest. A series is cumulative, inclusive, insistent on imposing a single, shared, meaning, or a meaning dependent on the contribution of each item to the whole. In this series of self-portraits, what is shared is the erasure of the face or its representation as a blue stain over which splinters recreate facial features whose gestures show pain, confusion, or, in all, the repeated abolition of the face. This series of self-portraits tries out the modes of destruction, and what is erased is much more than the face: gone is the memory of travels, home, the sacred, the stable: the self.

If Roche’s blue has been from the start related to the end of time or the cosmos itself, in these recent works it specifically addresses the very own image of the artistic subject. It is Roche’s face and his style what have come under the destructive force of chaos.

Defacement is the main feature of the featureless face salvaged by splinters, and the mask, made of wood, takes the place of the face, as if “style” no longer pertained to “the man”, as if what’s left is only the “style”. We are witnesses of the death of the artist, survived by destruction as a style.

The works on the west and south walls of the main gallery expand on the meaning of the self-portrait to include allegorical motifs that take us back to the artistic subject. Distant shoes, The Truth by Mouth, Prometheus, and The Nail of My Cross (2014), use mythological or religious figures to portray the subject

and decompose the self-portrait to include those new meanings: Prometheus and The Nail of My Cross deal with the sacrificial subject: Prometheus as the giver of fire to humanity, and Christ as the giver of hope. Both were punished in the process of saving humanity, and appear dismembered as images of the artist. Roche’s nail carves wood and produces art, while Prometheus’ fire is taken away by an iconic eagle that reminds us of the political power of the United States. In Roche’s version of the Prometheus myth, Zeus wins the battle and the fire is taken away from humanity. In The Truth

by Mouth, from the artist’s mouth comes out Goya’s famous painting of Spanish citizens killed by a French firing squad during the Spanish War of Independence.

A hero stands with his arms open surrounded by dead rebels trying to defend his homeland. Heroism has become hard, almost impossible. According to Roche, ours are unheroic times. Sacrifice seems to lead us nowhere.

The Collector (2014), The Sower (2016) and Looking for the Sun (2016), share a somewhat different style, are less violent in their composition and emphasize on the floral element. The first of the three uses the artist’s face as a container-mask that gathers flowers and miscellaneous objects drawn on balsa wood, probably alluding to the ephemeral nature of all collections and all collectors. The Sower presents a face of balsa wood superimposed on a still life that is a small container garden. In Looking for the Sun, balsa wood chips make the face barely discernible,

From top to bottom: THE SOWER, 2014 LOOKING FOR A SUN, 2015 Mix Media On Paper, 85” x 80”

almost erased by light. Only the somber eyes stand out from the chaotic image. These square paintings, less violent than the self-portraits on the opposite wall, go deeper into the actual desolation of the self: useless heroes, frustrated collectors, container gardeners who lead unsubstantial and useless lives, always about to lose their form and purpose, all this stressed by the fact that they depend on small pieces of soft wood to become “real”.

In this allegorical vein, the exhibition includes, on the south wall, a grand machine: Do You Know Where The Allmighty dwells? (2005), a frottage that presents the body of one model, repeated in different positions.

The emphatic white shines through the frottaged bodies that float or are tossed about as if lifeless.

Faces are technically absent from this mass of bodies, as if the mass were a distorted serialized portrait of an anonymous human being that stands for humanity itself. The thematic change from the “I” of he selfportrait to the body of another that represents a collective body suggests an austere minimalism. The fact that the frottage technique presents bodies in their actual size forces the viewer to respond to an event that may impact the real bodies that stand before this image. We are unsure of whether there is a dichotomy between figure and background, as the gleaming white surface that also shines through the bodies, and becomes almost tangible because of the force it exerts upon this swirling humanity.

A Second Look The exhibition closes with a theoretical proposal: it is necessary to take stock of the work done. In the works displayed in The Vault, the artist meditates on two of his paradigmatic works: We have to Dream in Blue (1986) and The Garden of Intolerance (2003), part of the series titled Fraternos (Brothers, 2003-2005), a close dialogue with the work of Vincent van Gogh.

We Have to Dream in Blue is probably Roche’s most famous painting, used as iconic image in international collective shows of Latin American and Caribbean art. This self-portrait depicts Roche as a dark body with intense blue eyes, coconut-hair skin, crowned by sugarcane leaves. An image of “Caribeñismo”, Roche’s race stands out in a body made of kitschy elements used to represent the Caribbean, save for two things: the blue is not in the sky or the sea, but in his eyes, and the surroundings lack the chaos of real tropical wilderness. This extremely beautiful and ideologically shocking image is reconsidered in The Second Look (2014). Instead of oil on canvas, we have oil and wood on paper in a sort of collage where the same image is divested of all color except blue (the blue eyes have taken over the rest) and painting is replaced by graphic printing and drawing.

The repetition distorts the original background of the image, its splendid rendition of body and color, and reduces all to the mere print of a now distorted selfportrait.

The other “second look” is Intolerance, a frottage of the oil triptych The Garden of Intolerance. Faced

with losing one of his best works, the artist frottaged it in three separate panels of paper. Like all frottages, the end result is of the same size and gathers enough information to allow the viewer to recognize the original. Intolerance has only one color: Roche’s “toxic blue”. In the original painting, the garden speaks about the narrow landscape or walled garden, the self portrait and the still life. In its central panel, there is an overflowing fountain on whose spilled water two babies float. Each lateral panel depicts — as if they were twins and, therefore, rivals—one of the brothers: on the right, a terrified Roche sits on van Gogh’s famous chair. On the left panel, his brother, bearing the expression of a madman, winnows the seed he keeps on a waist bag, a reminiscence of van Gogh’s famous sower. Roche has rubbed the surface of the triptych to reproduce its textures, to face off the image remembered and the image kept by rubbing, and to create a new image on the markings left by the old one. What is left of the original image is touch, translated into a completely different work.

The final work, re-titled Intolerance, rubbed and retouched in indigo blue, salvages the textures of the original painting, turns a rope which separated the space of the siblings within the garden into a sort of frontier of abstraction, and hardens the likeness between the brothers who are turned into twins by the monochromatic blue. Maybe the element of identity of the identical twins was essential from the start, but it is foregrounded now because the monochromatic

From top to bottom: Triptych: THE GARDEN OF INTOLERANCE In The End, Like Fathers, Madmen Or Heroes 2002 Oil On Canvas 8’ x 24’ Triptych: INTOLERANCE, 2014 Mix Media, 156” x 296”

scheme makes it more explicit. The rivalry between the brothers, evident throughout the Fratenos series, was the most important thing, and now we become fully aware of it. Memory enhances some details and suppresses some others, the hardest, most important elements of the image. Like a sarcophagus, memory eats the flesh and puts the bones aside.

Two additional self-portraits have been included in The Vault: The Cage (2014) and Any Window (2014) as remainders of the works from which The Second Look and Intolerance take distance. Whereas Roche’s selfportraits have a strong theoretical stand, these two “second looks” go beyond mere theory and restate Roche’s ouvre as a whole. Seriality, repetition, citation have been Roche’s modes of emphasis throughout his career, but his blue minimalism has probably shown him how deeply formal is his artistic venture. In many ways, and without losing his puissance with regard to the crisis of the subject, Roche has realized that his blue minimalism has a more persuasive strength than the colorful images of his former style. Moreover, the theoretical second look of his former style operates a deconstruction in his blue works so than both can work together and constitute a crisis-provoking system that literally pushes his own art to a crisis. This complex redundancy is what gives Roche’s blue works their extraordinary ideological thrust.

The Blue of Ruins For long, blue has stood as the color of the divine and the color or melancholy. For Roche, blue is none of these: blue is toxic, it is the color of death, decomposition, catastrophe, oblivion. Blue is the hue of ruin: the ruin of the subject, the ruin of the selfportrait, the ruin of the landscape, the ruin of the world as we know it. Roche is still “dreaming in blue”, but his dream has turned into the nightmare of dispossession, radical homelessness, turmoil, where all bodies lose their shape and identity, and their place on Earth. A second look goes deeper into those intuitions in works that are fragile, about to come apart. These works gives us no hope, and they share with us a wisdom that might have come to us too late to be useful.

Considering this, Roche’s work —through its form and technique, its subject matter and its narratives— will keep giving us a chance for a second look if we are willing to open our eyes. And I say, “Fair enough”.

From left to right: THE CAGE ANY WINDOW 2014 Mix Media On Paper 32” x 26”

End Notes: 1. Lilliana Ramos Collado e Ivette Fred. “Azul: El renacimiento de Arnaldo Roche Rabell.” Arnaldo Roche Rabell / Azul. San Juan: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (2009). Lilliana Ramos Collado. “Ecce Pictor: Arnaldo Roche Rabell’s Sacrificial Blue”. In Omar Pascual Castillo, Arnaldo Roche Rabell En Azul: Señales después del tacto. Gran Canaria: CAAM (2015). Lilliana Ramos Collado. “Empuje y resistencia: Autorretratos de Arnaldo Roche Rabell.” Visión Doble, June 15, 2015 http://www.visiondoble.net/2015/06/15/empuje-y-resistencia-autorretratosde-arnaldo-roche-rabell/ . Lilliana Ramos Collado, “Un jardín de Arnaldo Roche Rabell”. Visión Doble, June 15, 2014, http://www.visiondoble.net/2014/06/15/unjardin-de-arnaldo-roche-rabell-en-el-mapr/ . Lilliana Ramos Collado. “Un espacio para lo íntimo: Arnaldo Roche Rabell”. Bodegón con Teclado, Diciembre de 2014, https://bodegonconteclado.wordpress.com/2014/12/30/un-espacio-para-lointimo-arnaldo-roche-rabell/.

2. László Moholy-Nagy. “A New Instrument of Vision”. In Liz Wells, ed. The Photography Reader. London: Routledge (2003): 95.

Lilliana Ramos Collado, Ph.D. Lilliana Ramos Collado, Ph.D., was senior curator at the Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art for five years (2009-­2013). There, she curated and/or co-­curated more that 25 collective and solo exhibitions, including Arnaldo Roche Rabell: Azul in 2009. She has published several articles and essays on the work of Roche Rabell in reviews, scholarly journals, collective books and catalogs, and has lectured extensively on his art. She was Executive Director of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, and is full professor at the University of Puerto Rico School of Architecture.

Ramos Collado has re­published most of her essays, books and articles on art and literature in her blog titled Bodegón con Teclado: bodegonconteclado.wordpress. com She also co-­hosts Palabras Encontradas, a radio show at the University of Puerto Rico Radio Station. The show is aired every Tuesday at 3:00 pm, Atlantic time.

THE SECOND LOOK 2014 Mix Media On Paper 84” x 84”

Left to right: THE COLLECTOR Untitled THE TRUTH BY THE MOUTH 2016 Four2014 found photographs from a yard sale, Mix Media On Paper digital print on paper (poster), 84” x 84” Pantone samples on acrylic shelf Variable sizes

ARNALDO ROCHE RABELL San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1955 Academic Background 1984 MFA, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago 1982 BFA, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago 1974-78 Studies in Architecture, University of Puerto Rico

Awards and Grants 2006 The Best Museum Solo Show Award, Asociación

Internacional de Críticos de Arte, San Juan, PR 2006 Award Winner of AICA Special Prize, San Juan, PR 2005 The Best Museum Solo Show, AICA Award, Dominican Republic 1998 Award Winner, Primera Bienal Internacional,

Venezuela 1991 Award in the Visual Arts 10 1989 Painting Prize, Segunda Bienal Internacional de

Pintura. Cuenca, Ecuador 1982 James Nelson Raymond Traveling Fellowship, Art

Institute of Chicago, Illinois 1981 Lincoln Award, Illinois State Government

Selected Solo Shows 2016

2016

2015

2014

2014

2009

2009-08

The Blue of Ruins, Point of Contact Gallery, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY Arnaldo Roche, El territorio del alma, Walter Otero Contemporary Art, San Juan, PR Arnaldo Roche, In Blue: Signals After Touch (Frottages), Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Arnaldo Roche ….For they shall inherit the earth. Latin American Masters, Los Angeles, California Arnaldo Roche Recent Works, Walter Otero Contemporary Art, San Juan, Puerto Rico Azul/ Blue, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico “Brotherhood/Hermandad,” Arnaldo Roche Rabell, Museum of Latin American Art MOLAA, Long Beach, CA

2008 Recent Works, Spinnerei, Leipzig, Germany 2008 “Brotherhood/Hermandad,” Chicago Cultural

Center, Chicago, Illinois 2006 Obra reciente, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Panamá 2003 Fraternos, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico 1998 Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, Nomadas del espiritu de la

material Pinturas 1985-1997Museo de Bellas Artes,

Caracas, Venezuela 1996 “Arnaldo Roche-Rabell: The Uncommonwealth,”

(Traveling Exhibition Curated by Robert Hobbs)

Anderson Gallery -Virginia Commonwealth University,

Richmond; Museum of American Art -Pennsylvania

Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Nevada

Museum of Art, Reno; Krannert Art Museum- College

of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

1993 Arnaldo Roche-Rabell First Ten Years Museo de Arte

Contemporáneo, Monterrey, México 1988 Arnaldo Roche Rabell, St. Louis Galllery of

Contemporary Art, Saint Louis, Missouri

Selected Group Shows 2016 Nexo/Nexus: Latin American Connections in the Midwest, De Paul Art Museum, Chicago, IL 2015 Fusion: Art of the 21st Century, Virginia Museum of

Fine Art, Richmond, Virginia 2014 Caribbean Crossroads: of the World at the Perez Art

Museum Miami 2012-13 Caribbean: Crossroads of the World 2010–09 Paint Made Flesh, Frist Center for the Visual Arts,

Nashville, TN; The Phillips Collection, Washington,

D.C.; The Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY 2007 Selection of the Permanent Collection, Nassau

County Museum, New York 2005-06 Portrait, El Museo del Barrio, NY/ San Diego

Museum of Art, CA/ Bass Museum of Art, FL

The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution,

Washington, D.C. / San Antonio Museum of Art, TX 2005 Figuratively Speaking, Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL 2005 ARCO Art Fair (Madrid) with Walter Otero Gallery

SOLO SHOW 2003 Urbanity Humanity: Acquisitions and Selections from

the Permanent Collection, Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY 2002 Crisis Response, RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of

Design, Providence, RI 2002 I Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami, FL 2001 Humor and Rage, Caixa Fundation Catalunya,

Barcelona, España 1998 XXXème Festival International de la Peinture,

Chateau Grimaldi, Cagnes-Sur-Mer, Francia 1997 Absolut Art Biennial Invitational, Los Angeles, CA 1996 Art in Chicago, 1945-1995, Museum of

Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL 1995 The Reconstructed Figure: The Human Image in

Contemporary Art, Katonah Museum of Art, NY 1995 Janssen Collection of Contemporary European and

American Art, Jones Museum of Art of the University

of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 1994 Selections from the Collection, Hirshhorn Museum

and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. 1992-93 Latin American Artists of the XXth Century, Museum

of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou,

Paris, France; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany;

exposición itinerante, Estación Plaza de Armas,

Sevilla, España 1992 Encounters, The School of the Art Institute of

Chicago, Chicago, IL 1991 Awards in the Visual Arts 10, Hirshhorn Museum

and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution,

Washington, D.C. ; Albuquerque Museum of Art,

History and Science, Albuquerque, NM; The

Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH 1990 The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980’s, Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art; The Studio Museum; The New Museum; New York, NY 1989 Chicago Artists in the European Tradition, Museum of

Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL 1989 Painting Biennial, Museum of Modern Art, Cuenca, Ecuador 1987 Hispanic Art in the United States; Thirty Contemporary

Painters and Sculptors, The Museum of Fine Arts,

Washington, D.C.; The Lowe Art Museum, Miami, FL;

of New Mexico, Santa Fe, NM 1987 Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo, México,

D.F., México, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los

Angeles, CA; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY;

1987 1987

1987

1986

1985

1984 1983

Art of the Fantastic - 1920-1987, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN; The Queens Museum, Queens, NY; Center of the Fine Arts, Miami, FL; Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo, México, D.F., México.

XIX São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil.

15th Competition & Exhibition, The Union League Club, Chicago, IL Recent Developments in Latin American Drawings, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL Made in America; The Great Lakes States, Alternative Museum, New York, NY “81 st. Exhibition of Artists of Chicago and Vicinity,” Chicago, IL Portrait Look-Alikes, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL The Big Pitcher; 20 Years of Abstracted Figure in Chicago Art, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL

STAFF: Pedro Cuperman Artistic Director Miranda Traudt Managing Director Rainer Wehner Preparator Amanda Sterling Connie Flores Kendall Harter Gallery Assistants Tere Paniagua Executive Director Cultural Engagement College of Arts and Sciences Syracuse University

ILLUMINATED 2014 Mix Media On Paper 32” x 26”

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