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