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22 - 24 April 2005
Four Lines: Creation, Collection, Education Exhibition
Art from Latin America in Contemporary practice
In April 2005 the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art
will launch UECLAA Online, a fully searchable catalogue that will be accessible
to internet users worldwide. The catalogue will contain images of each artwork,
texts on every artist, a glossary of key terms and a concise summary of developments
in modern and contemporary art in the Latin American countries represented by the Collection.
The April 2005 conference, Four Lines: Creation, Collection, Education, Exhibition
will launch UECLAA Online, and situate this project
in relation to aspects of the rapidly expanding field of
theory and practice that comes under the rubric Latin American Art.
Four Lines: Creation, Collection, Education, Exhibition
also keys into our evolving relationship with Colchester
arts organisation Firstsite. UECLAA OnLine will be
formally launched at the opening of the conference
in the Firstsite gallery, where Assistant Director of Firstsite,
Annabel Longbourne, will curate an exhibition by the gallery’s
first Latin American artist in residence (Nicholas Robbio).
Our list of speakers is now confirmed as, (in order of appearance):
Gabriel Peréz-Barreiro, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art
Beverly Adams, The Halle Collection
Hans Herzog, Daros Latin America
Rafael Romero, Coleccion Cisneros
Cuauhtémoc Medina, Tate
Taina Caragol, MoMA
Michael Asbury, University of the Arts
Luis Camnitzer, State University of New York
Maria Clara Bernal, Visiting Arts and Universidad de los Andes
Ana Sokoloff, Christies New York
Jaime Gili, Artist
Virginia Peréz Ratton, TÉOR/etica
Eduardo Brandão, Galeria Vermelho
Admission is free but places are limited. For further information
and to book, please contact Isobel Whitelegg
icjwhi@essex.ac.uk, +44 (0) 1206 873 2076
An exhibition of prints by Mexican artist Demián Flores Cortés at University Gallery
Two wrestling matches featuring the great Hijo del
Santo and Blue Panther directly from Mexico City
A festival of film screenings on the subject of
lucha libre (Mexican wrestling)
With generous support from:
Arts Council of England
Origina, Mexico
the Mexican Foreign Office
the Mexican Embassy in London
New
space for UECLAARafael Viñoly Architects (RVA), one of the world's leading practices, will design Colchester's new £16 million visual arts building, spearheading a £100m regeneration of the East of England region. They were selected following an open submission competition run by RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) in which over 100 international architects expressed interest in the project.
Click here to the read more.
UECLAA
symposium, 23 October 2003'Latin American Art in UK Universities and Museums: Past Present and Future'
Places are limited so please click for further details and contact information.
Art centre
dream set to come true, (Colchester) Weekly News, Wednesday, April 2, 2003Katherine Wood, Director of Firstsite@ the minories art gallery in Colchester explains plans for a new visual arts centre incorporating a permanent exhibition space for UECLAA.
Click here to the read the entire article.
UECLAA OnLine Project, Evening Gazette,
24th September, 2002.In this article, Professor Valerie Fraser talks about the UECLAA Online Project and says: "The sky is the limit...". Click here to the read the entire article.
Artist in Residence 2002 - Alex GamaBrazilian printmaker Alex Gama visited England in April 2002 to produce a series of prints for UECLAA. Alex Gama is one of UECLAA’s more important donors, with 28 pieces in the collection, including some of his cedar wood printing boards. Click here for more
Elisa
BracherThis year saw the installation of a new sculpture in Wivenhoe Park. Elisa Bracher's Untitled, two gigantic Amazonian tree trunks bolted together so that one appears to be embracing the other, is a donation from the Marilia Razuk gallery of São Paulo. After being exhibited in Hanover it was transported to the university and erected on a rise above the library. The warm red of the bare wood contrasts with the weathered bark of the oaks and sycamores nearby.
Latin American art was one of the main themes in this year's 28th conference of the Association of Art Historians at the University of Liverpool in April. Under the general title 'Culture, Capital, Colony' the conference encouraged those attending to 'interrogate the status of historical and contemporary art and art writing within a global context, and specifically to review the impact of European and US socio-economic and cultural development on the peoples and art of other continents'. Contributors included UECLAA Directors Dawn Ades and Valerie Fraser. In her plenary address Dawn Ades spoke of the importance of Latin American art and art criticism. Valerie Fraser convened a session on colonial art in Latin America in which past Essex students and UECLAA supporters Adrian Locke and Eleanor Wake participated, and also gave a paper reviewing the literature on the subject.
Residencies
ProgrammeA new programme of residencies for Latin American artists was launched in 2001. UECLAA's first guest was Argentinean multimedia artist Jorge Orta, who developed a programme of talks and worked with the students, scientists and local communities in his project Life Nexus between May and October 2001. Alex Gama was the second artist in residence at UECLAA, and his work stay was linked to the exhibition of his work at Gallery 32 in London. In the future, UECLAA will invite artists to take up residencies in Colchester and produce exhibitions on a random basis.
On the 20th of October 2000 UECLAA and the Latin American Centre organised this seminar to coincide with the Brazilian celebrations.
Speakers included:
Artists Milton Machado and Cristina Pape
Art Historians Oriana Baddeley and Michael Asbury
The seminar was be chaired by Dawn Ades.
The papers are published online by ARARA
Valerie FraserIn September 2000 Valerie Fraser visited Brasília to attend the Docomomo conference on modern architecture and to visit the universities of Salvador and Florianopolis, where students from the University of Essex were studying. Her book on the modernist architecture of Latin America, Building the New World: Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America 1930-1960, was published by Verso in December. In the spring of this year she visited Carlos Cruz-Diez in his Paris studio to hear more about his artistic practice and his work on the perception of colour. In September she was visiting lecturer at the Universidade of São Paulo, where she taught a postgraduate course in Pre-Columbian art in the Department of Archaeology and Museology.
In June 1999, UECLAA was invited to participate in the Cuban Festival Cuba Presente! organised by the Barbican Centre in London. After conducting extremely insightful interviews with the artists Sandra Ramos, Lázaro Saavedra, Gabinete de Diseño Ordo Amoris, Fernando Rodriguez and Luis Gomez, Gabriela Salgado gave a slide presentation entitled 'Myth and Reality: The position of Cuba in the context of Latin American contemporary art'.
Idolo con poporo 2000 - Nadin OspinaColombian artist Nadin Ospina has donated a piece of of his work, Idolo con poporo 2000 to UECLAA. The work of Nadin Ospina makes evident the complex relation Latin America has with its cultural paradigms and he does it from a critical and sometimes ironic position. In this case the artist endows 'Idolo con poporo 2000' with the full frontal solidity and atemporality of the San Agustin pre-Columbian totem statuary, and yet charges it with an alien login.
UECLAA now includes an important collection of works on paper by the Chilean artist Carlos Hermosilla (1905-1991) kindly loaned by Mrs Ruby Reid Thompson, a Chilean collector based in Colchester. Hermosilla taught print-making at the School of Fine Arts in Viña del Mar for thirty four years until he was dismissed from his post by the Pinochet administration. His work includes portraits of his many friends in the Chilean literary and artistic circles of the times, including the poets Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, and he had a powerful influence on a whole generation of younger Chilean artists including Santos-Cháves and Eduardo Vilches.
The occasion of this loan was marked by the exhibition Hermosilla: Works on Paper at the Minories Gallery in Colchester in collaboration with Firstsite. This included a selection of Hermosilla's lino cuts, wood cuts, etchings, drawings, and collages together with other personal memorabilia, including some Mapuche jewellery and a manuscript poem sent to Mrs Reid Thompson by Pablo Neruda. The Chilean Ambassador to the UK, H.E. Christian Barros Melet, was guest of honour at the private view.
The loan to UECLAA is accompanied by a collection of personal correspondence with the artist that documents Hermosilla's political and social concerns, particularly during the years of dictatorship in Chile. This unique collection of works of art and artist's letters offers exciting possibilities for research and we are seeking ways of raising funds to establish a fellowship to enable a Chilean student to come to the University of Essex to work with it.
The collection received a number of new donations in 2000 and 2001. Click here for a full list.
