A conversation with Remco de Blaaij

Monday 16 December, 2013, 7 pm, at Alice Yard

Remco de Blaaij is a Glasgow-based curator and the second recipient of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Travel Award for Central America and the Caribbean. On Monday 16 December, at 7 pm, he will give an informal talk at Alice Yard on his current research project.

The Cisneros Award supports a contemporary art curator based anywhere in the world to travel to Central America and the Caribbean to research art and cultural activities in the region. De Blaaij recently conducted research about women’s activist practices in Guatemala, Jamaica, Nicaragua, and Suriname. He visited local artists, art institutions, and non-profit organisations such as EspIRA in Nicaragua and Ciudad de la Imaginación in Guatemala, and interviewed local art historians and curators. His project explores how to think about the wealth of artistic practices in this region, and the social and economic context in which art is produced.

All are invited.

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About Remco de Blaaij:

Remco de Blaaij has been curator at CCA Glasgow since October 2012. Previously he co-curated Picasso in Palestine while working at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands (2007–12). He also worked on the team of Be(com)ing Dutch, a two-year project in the museum that dealt with residues of globalisation, national identity, and immigration. He moved to London in 2011 to conclude his research at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University, with the publication too little, too late, on border practices of visual culture against the backdrop of Suriname.

Versia Harris: They Say You Can Dream a Thing More Than Once

Thursday 21 November, 2013, 7.30 pm, at Alice Yard

Versia Harris is artist in residence at Alice Yard during November 2013. She has spent her time in Port of Spain revisiting and re-exploring two ongoing video animation projects, in conversation with Alice Yard’s network of collaborators.

On Thursday 21 November, at 7.30 pm, Harris will present these two works — A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes When You’re Awake and They Say You Can Dream a Thing More Than Once — in a large-scale installation at Alice Yard. All are invited.

Versia Harris writes:

“My work explores the fantasies and experiences of an original character. This character is introduced to Walt Disney animations and consequently layers what she desires from these animations onto her life, especially her physical self. Her perception of and her relationship with her world change, as she compares reality and fantasy.... I have created two narrative animations surrounding the chase of continuously unfulfilled desires. At Alice Yard, my intention was to revisit these animations and explore different and more engaging ways of presenting this story to an audience.”

About the artist:

Versia Harris is a Barbadian artist living and working in Weston, St James. She graduated from the Barbados Community College with a BFA in the Studio Art programme in 2012, with an award from The Leslie’s Legacy Foundation. She has previously participated in residencies at Projects and Space (Barbados, 2011), Fresh Milk (Barbados, 2013), the Vermont Studio Centre (USA, 2013), and Instituto Buena Bista (Curaçao, 2013).

This event is supported
by North Eleven.

Project 35 Volume 2

Selections from an international exhibition of artists’ videos, produced by Independent Curators International

Tuesday 12 November, 2013, 7.30 to 10 pm, at Alice Yard



Still from My Father Looks for an Honest City (2010), by Basim Magdy


Project 35 is an itinerant video exhibition selected by 35 international curators, and organised by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. First launched in 2010, it now includes a second programme of single-channel videos, again drawing from ICI’s extensive network of curators to trace the complexity of regional and global connections among practitioners, and the variety of approaches used to make video.

This new selection of 35 curators from six continents (including Alice Yard co-director Christopher Cozier) each chose one work for this compilation, touring September 2012 through December 2014.

On Tuesday 12 November, 2012, from 7.30 to 10 pm, Alice Yard will present an installation of selected works from Project 35 Volume 2 (to be followed by a second selection in January 2014).

These selected video works — by artists ranging from Turkey to the Bahamas, from Egypt to Brazil, from China to Norway — reflect on the intersections of routine and ritual, the mundane and the absurd, the possibility or impossibility of intelligible communication.

The occasion will also welcome Alice Yard’s current artist in residence, Versia Harris of Barbados.

All are invited.

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Project 35 Volume 2 is a traveling exhibition produced by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. The exhibition is made possible, in part, by grants from the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and the Robert Lehman Foundation; the ICI Board of Trustees; and donors to ICI's Access Fund.

Independent Curators International (ICI) connects emerging and established curators, artists, and institutions to forge international networks and generate new forms of collaboration through the production of exhibitions, events, publications, and curatorial training. Headquartered in New York, the organization provides public access to the people and practices that are key to current developments in curating and exhibition-making around the world, inspiring fresh ways of seeing and contextualizing contemporary art. Since it was established in 1975, ICI has worked with over 1,000 curators and 3,700 artists from 47 countries worldwide.

A conversation with Kobena Mercer

Wednesday 23 October, 2013, 7 pm, at Alice Yard

Kobena Mercer is an art historian based at Yale University. In October 2013, he will visit Alice Yard to explore recent developments in Trinidad's art scene. On Wednesday 23 October, at 7 pm, he will give an informal talk at Alice Yard.

Beginning with a screening of an excerpt from Vincent Meessen's Vita Nova (2009), Mercer will explore some of the questions raised by the short film. Vita Nova was inspired by the image of an African military cadet saluting the French flag, which appeared on the cover of Paris-Match, and was analysed by Roland Barthes in his 1957 essay "The Myth Today".

All are invited.

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About Kobena Mercer:

Kobena Mercer writes and teaches on the visual arts of the black diaspora, examining African-American, Caribbean, and Black British artists in modern and contemporary art. His research addresses cross-cultural aesthetics in transnational contexts where issues of race, sexuality, and identity converge.

His first book, Welcome to the Jungle (1994), introduced new lines of inquiry in art, photography, and film. Mercer is the author of monographic studies on Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Isaac Julien, Renee Green, and Keith Piper, as well as historical studies of James VanDer Zee, Romare Bearden, and Adrian Piper. He is the editor of the Annotating Art’s Histories series, published by MIT and INIVA. He is also an inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing awarded by the Sterling and Francise Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts.

His next book, Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s, is a collection of essays forthcoming from Duke University Press. Current research interests include the historiography of Black Atlantic visual arts and a new book-length study on Diaspora Aesthetics in Afro-Modernism.

A conversation with Tobias Ostrander + Postcards from the New Republic

Thursday 5 September, 2013, 7.30 pm, at Alice Yard

Tobias Ostrander is chief curator and deputy director for curatorial affairs at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. In early September 2013 he will visit Alice Yard to meet members of our network of collaborators and explore recent developments in Trinidad's art scene.

On Thursday 5 September, at 7.30 pm, Ostrander will give a short and informal talk about key issues in contemporary curatorship, some recent curatorial projects, and his vision for PAMM.

The evening also includes an installation of Postcards from the New Republic, a work by Pinky and Emigrante (Alicia Milne and Luis Vasquez La Roche), created during their recent participation in the Open Ateliers Zuidoost Artists in Residence (OAZO AIR) programme in Amsterdam.

P&E created a series of postcards and posters that poke fun at relations between the former coloniser and colonies that now make up the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Upon investigating the national symbols of the former Netherlands Antilles, P&E decided to redesign the coat of arms of Aruba and Curaçao by removing European elements and replacing them with imagery with an island context.

Images of the new coat of arms are combined in postcard and poster form with photographs of the Netherlands landscape, but labelled as an Antillean country. The project suggests questions about a hypothetical role reversal in Dutch colonial history, and notions of ownership and control.

All are invited.

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About Tobias Ostrander:

Tobias Ostrander has served as chief curator and deputy director for curatorial affairs at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (formerly the Miami Art Museum) since 2011. From 2009 to 2011, he was the director of the Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City, where he produced solo projects with numerous artists, including Geoffrey Farmer, Melanie Smith, Thomas Glassford, Karina Peisajovich, Mario Garcia Torres, Pablo Rasgado, Leonor Antunes, Praneet Soi, and Mariana Castillo Deball. From 2001 to 2009 he served as the Chief Curator at the Museo Tamayo. Examples of the exhibitions he produced there include Liliana Porter (2009); Jeff Wall (2008); Lisa Yuskavage (2006); Unspeakable Happiness: A Selection of Contemporary Art from China (2005); Sodium and Asphault: British Art in Mexico (2004); Bas Jan Ader (2003). He is a founding member of the Museum As Hub at the New Museum in New York City and has co-curated several exhibitions for the project, including: Marcel Broodthaers and Liliana Porter: The Incongruous Image (2011) and Tlatelolco and the localized negotiation of future imaginaries (2008). His recent exhibitions in Miami include Frames of Reference: Latin American Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection and Restless: Selections from the Collection of the Miami Art Museum (2012).

About Pinky and Emigrante:

Luis Vasquez La Roche was born in 1983 in Caracas, Venezuela. He moved to Trinidad and Tobago in 2002. He later studied visual arts at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. His works are explorations of personal experiences and his new adopted space and culture. He has participated in several group shows, such as Erotic Art Week TT (2010), Mensajes Positivos in Chile (2011), and PFC (pon una foto en la calle) in Venezuela (2012). In 2012 he had his first solo exhibition in Trinidad, titled The Search – La Busqueda.

Alicia Milne is a Trinidadian artist who enjoys working with tactile materials. She also has an interest in manipulating moving images. Her drawings, plaster, ceramic and video works have been exhibited in Trinidad, Grenada, and the United States. After a voluntary sabbatical while settling into teaching art in a local secondary school, she is currently working on a series that merges digital and drawn images on tactile surfaces.

While both artists maintain individual artistic practices, they also collaborate in creating street installations and pastings, zines, exhibitions, and murals.

A conversation with Michelle Eistrup

Thursday 15 August, 2013, 7.30 pm, at Alice Yard

Michelle Eistrup has been artist in residence at Alice Yard during July and August 2013. She has spent her time in Port of Spain working on two ongoing projects, This Particular Masquerade and Pitch Molded Animability, as well as meeting and collaborating with Trinidad-based artists in Alice Yard’s network.

On Thursday 15 August, at 7.30 pm, Eistrup will give an informal talk about her recent and current work, accompanied by an installation of recent video works. All are invited.

Still from Too Long Are Our Memories Recordings, Nairobi, Kenya, 2010

About the artist:

Michelle Eistrup was born in Denmark and grew up in Jamaica, Paris, and New York City. She currently resides in Copenhagen. She graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Arts, and has a BA in social anthropology from Haverford College, Pennsylvania. She has exhibited in art institutions and galleries in Europe, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, including the Aarhus Art Museum, Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), Arnolfini (London), the Momentum Nordic Festival for Modern Art (Moss, Norway), the Modern Museum (Stockholm), Sparwasser (Berlin), the Fine Art Museum (Kuala Lumpur), The Taitu Art Center (Addis Ababa) and the National Art Gallery of Jamaica (Kingston).

This residency is supported by the Danish Arts Council

Conversation with Nicole Awai

7pm / Tuesday / June 25 / at Alice Yard

Since the beginning of June, New York based, Trinidadian artist
Nicole Awai has been researching and working from Alice Yard on an Art Matters Grant. Her investigations lead her to La Brea and, after all this time, to a puzzling personal story of a childhood school excursion, she recalls, or imagined but actually may have missed. Derived from her research and photographs, she has embarked on an experimental wall work.  Over the last seven years, Alice Yard has been actively facilitating exchange and project development with contemporary artists of the region and its diaspora. Please join us for this ongoing dialogue. All are welcome.
Please note that, during the course of this week, Awai's wall drawing will appear and then disappear by Saturday June 27th.

Tonight at 7PM ( June 20th )

Nicole Awai, artist in residence.

Since the beginning of June, New York based, Trinidadian artist  Nicole Awai has been researching and working from Alice Yard on an Art Matters Grant. Her investigations lead her to La Brea and, after all this time, to a puzzling personal story of a childhood school excursion, she recalls, or imagined but actually may have missed.

"...In the last 12 years there has consistently been the presence of an ‘oozing’ materiality in my work. At first it was viscous and lava-like and it manifested itself in the colors red, white and blue. Finally it became a black ooze in the drawing series,  Specimens from Local Ephemera. I began to think of it as a site of simultaneous creation and destruction, becoming and ending where time is elastic and non-linear....Now that my black ooze has become such a vital, physical element in my work, I decided to have the real experience of the La Brea Pitch Lake. I am curious about how the mythology of this imagined space germinated in my head...."

Awai was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2011. She earned her Master’s Degree in Multimedia Art from the University of South Florida. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and currently serves as a Critic for the Yale School of Art. Her work has been included in several seminal exhibitions, including the first Greater New York: New Art in New York Now, at P.S. 1/MoMA (2000), the Biennale of Ceramic in Contemporary Art (2003) the 2008 Busan Biennale in Korea, Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art (2007), and Open House: Working in Brooklyn (2004), the latter two held at the Brooklyn Museum. Ms. Awai was a featured artist in the 2005 I.P.O. series at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Recent exhibitions includes her solo exhibition, Almost Undone at the Vilcek Foundation, Mi Papi, Dream On – Happy Ending… ,Washington Square Windows, 80wse Galleries NYU and the Biennale of the Caribbean in Aruba. Be Inspired! is currently on view at the Kemper  Museum of Contemporary. The exhibition features recent acquistions to the museum collection.

Help support two projects by members of Alice Yard's network

Promotional trailer for Kingston Shottas

Two current projects by members of Alice Yard’s network are raising financial support via the crowdfunding site Indiegogo.

Kingston Shottas, directed by Mariel Brown, is a documentary film in progress. “At a time when contemporary art from the Caribbean is catching fire internationally,” Brown writes, “Kingston Shottas follows Jamaican artists Marvin Bartley, Marlon James and Ebony G. Patterson as they take on the controversial issues of race, class, slavery and homosexuality; making photography-based work that captures, with an arresting honesty, the challenges and contradictions of being Jamaican in the 21st century, and simultaneously navigating the vicissitudes of rising through the ranks of the international art world.” The film is inspired in part by Shot in Kingston, an exhibition of photo-based work by younger Jamaican artists, curated by Christopher Cozier as part of Alice Yard’s 4x4 programme in 2010.

Find out more about the film and how you can lend your support here.

Artists Alicia Milne and Luis Vasquez La Roche, aka Pinky & Emigrante, have been selected to participate in a two-month residency at OAZO AIR in Amsterdam in July and August 2013. Their Indiegogo campaign will help cover travel, living, and materials costs for this residency. Find out more here.

Both crowdfunding campaigns offer special perks for donors.

Rodell Warner: Year of the Snake Eating Itself

Mohammeds

An exhibition and talk by artist in residence Sandra Brewster

Thursday 4 April, 2013, 7 to 10 pm, at Alice Yard

Sandra Brewster has been artist in residence at Alice Yard during February and March 2013. While in Port of Spain, she has created a new body of work, Mohammeds, which has evolved from her ongoing Smiths series. On Thursday 4 April, to mark the end of her residency, Brewster will show this new work at Alice Yard, and give a short artist’s talk. The exhibition will be open to the public from 7 to 10 pm on 4 April, and from 6 to 9 pm on 5 April.

Brewster writes:

“I’ve enjoyed playing in the Yard this last couple of months, travelling, making friends, and learning about Trinidad. Some of the results of this play will be installed throughout the space, complemented by a talk on how my work has started to travel in other directions at Alice Yard.

“Among the series I’ve worked on, the Smiths have been a recurring theme. The name Smith, a large section of a North American telephone directory, conjures up ideas of sameness and commonality and invisibility, as there are so many. Offering an element of humour, I use the name to mock the notion of a monolithic Black community — of course not all Smiths are related, or look or act the same. The Smiths are afro-headed characters that I present as paintings on slabs of wood, their bodies clothed in solid colour and their faces replaced with the Smith section of the phone directory. I continue to use them in various visual narratives and pieces that offer a questioning around concerns of identity and representation.

“Now the Smiths from Toronto have turned into Trinidadian Mohammeds. I’ve been playing with the components of the form, using them in new narratives, and engaging environments and people with 3D interpretations. I regard this experience, very much inspired by this place, as another new beginning to my practice.”


About the artist:

Sandra Brewster is a Canadian artist of Caribbean ancestry. She is a recipient of numerous grants to develop projects. Her work has been published in several journals and magazines: Of Note, The Walrus, Small Axe, Chimurenga, MIX, and NKA, among others. Recent exhibitions include 28 Days, Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto; Serious Play, SPACE, London, UK; (Re) Visions, The Print Studio, Hamilton, Ontario; Listen Installation, Robert Langen Gallery, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario; Fortune Tellers, Five Myles Gallery, New York; and Fleeting Face, A Space Gallery, Toronto. Her practice also includes work as an arts educator/community arts facilitator, and she has coordinated numerous exhibitions involving Toronto artists.

This residency is supported by the Ontario Arts Council

Verse to Converse

Friday / March 15 / 2013 / 7pm / Alice Yard

Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta

Hosted by Artist in Residence Sandra Brewster, a reading and discussion with Sri Lankan poet Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta, playing on the links between the Arts and History, Sri Lanka and the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. Krisantha, who is visiting from Sri Lanka, has read in Colombo, Beijing, New York, San Francisco, London, and Toronto. He will read from his latest work, Transfixion in Twilight. He is presently compiling: A Very Personal English History of the World. His books of poetry include: Cheqpoint in Heaven (2005), Aay Wha’ Kinda Indian Arr U? (1997), The 52nd State of Amnesia (1992), The Only Minority is the Bourgeoisie (1985), and Domestic Bliss (1981).

Sandra Brewster, artist in residence

1 February to 31 March, 2013
 

Sandra Brewster, Alice Yard's current artist in residence, is a multi-media artist creating work (drawings, paintings, video and mixed media) that engages issues of race, identity, representation, and memory. Her current focus is African-Canadians born in North America and those who arrived in North America from the Caribbean during the 1960s and 70s. At times, she references old photographs and recreates elements using painting, drawing, and gel transfers, juxtaposing imagery to provide a dialogue through contrasts or likenesses. In this work she visually represents a time or a memory and provides a platform to tell stories of “back home”. In other pieces Brewster presents portraits of individuals that challenge stereotypes and perceptions. Her ongoing series Smiths questions prevalent assertions about the existence of a monolithic Black Community.

Untitled (Smiths), mixed media on wood, 48x60 in., 2011

Brewster is a recipient of numerous grants to develop projects. Her work has been published in several journals and magazines: Of Note, The Walrus, Small Axe, Chimurenga, MIX, and NKA, among others. Recent exhibitions include 28 Days, Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto; Serious Play, SPACE, London, UK; (Re) Visions, The Print Studio, Hamilton, Ontario; Listen Installation, Robert Langen Gallery, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario; Fortune Tellers, Five Myles Gallery, New York; and Fleeting Face, A Space Gallery, Toronto. Her practice also includes work as an arts educator/community arts facilitator, and she has coordinated numerous exhibitions involving Toronto artists.

See a conversation by Sally Frater on Brewster's work here.

This residency is supported by the Ontario Arts Council

A conversation with Pinky & Emigrante

Thursday 21 February, 7 pm, at Alice Yard

Artists Luis Vasquez La Roche and Alicia Milne have been producing work together in the public space in Trinidad since 2011. Their tag, P&E, short for Pinky & Emigrante, is a playful reference to their shared interests in ideas of home and perception. While they both maintain individual artistic practices, they also collaborate in creating street installations and pastings, zines, exhibitions, and murals. They have participated in the Trinidad leg of the Urban Heartbeat mural project in the Queen’s Park Savannah (March 2012) and were specially invited to send work for an installation of their street pastings at the WOMA exhibition in Grenada (April 2012). In July 2013 they will participate in the  Open Ateliers Zuidoost Artists in Residence (OAZO AIR) programme in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

In their talk at Alice Yard, Vasquez La Roche and Milne will discuss their recent collaborative work and their experience of working in the public space. All are invited.

About the artists:

Luis Vasquez La Roche was born in 1983 in Caracas, Venezuela. He moved to Trinidad and Tobago in 2002. He later studied visual arts at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. His works are explorations of personal experiences and his new adopted space and culture. He has participated in several group shows, such as Erotic Art Week TT (2010), Mensajes Positivos in Chile (2011), and PFC (pon una foto en la calle) in Venezuela (2012). In 2012 he had his first solo exhibition in Trinidad, titled The Search – La Busqueda.

Alicia Milne is a Trinidadian artist who enjoys working with tactile materials. She also has an interest in manipulating moving images. Her drawings, plaster, ceramic and video works have been exhibited in Trinidad, Grenada, and the United States. After a voluntary sabbatical while settling into teaching art in a local secondary school, she is currently working on a series that merges digital and drawn images on tactile surfaces.

Come With It, Black Man

A documentary on calypsonian Black Stalin

Thursday 31 January, 7 pm, at Alice Yard

Filmmaker Tamara Tam-Cruikshank will host a screening of her documentary film Come With It, Black Man: A Biography of Black Stalin’s Consciousness at Alice Yard, followed by an informal conversation. All are invited.

Read a review of the film by B.C. Pires in the Trinidad Guardian here.

Collaborative Gestures

WDD25/The Cult of the Woman

Saturday 19 January, 2 to 7 pm, at Alice Yard

On Saturday 19 January, Alice Yard will host two informal events examining creative collaboration:

From 2 to 5 pm, the We Does Draw group will meet with artist Christopher Cozier for a conversation about his Development Patterns project, which invites open participation in his upcoming exhibition In Development at David Krut Projects in New York.

From 5 to 7 pm, Barbadian artist Shanika Grimes — currently artist in residence at Alice Yard — and her Trinidadian counterpart Michelle Isava will present the collaborative performance The Cult of the Woman, investigating “how women indoctrinate other women into submission to men” and the relationship of food and gender roles in both Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago.

Both events are open to the public and all are invited.