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Gendering Protest: Artist’s Lecture
October 29, 2020 @ 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
The Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities is pleased to announce the two-person exhibition, Gendering Protest: Deborah Castillo and Érika Ordosgoitti, which features the work of exiled Venezuelan artists whose art responds to the country’s political turmoil of the last decade.
Gendering Protest was on view from January 21 – March 11, 2020, in the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series Galleries, Douglass Library, until it was closed until further notice due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the exhibition will be moved online and reopens September 1, 2020 as part of this year’s CWAH Virtual programming. The exhibit is curated by art historian and curator, Tatiana Flores, Professor in the departments of Latino & Caribbean Studies and Art History, Rutgers University.
VIEW THE EXHIBITION HERE.
On Thursday, October 29th from 5:30-6:30pm (EST), join us for a virtual artist’s lecture on Zoom.
RSVP HERE.
The work of Castillo and Ordosgoitti carries a distinctly feminist form of social protest, relying on performative acts and activating the body in daring ways so as to challenge, not only the current political regime, but also heteronormative patriarchal culture and canonical Venezuelan aesthetics. In Venezuela’s economic heyday, geometric abstraction and architectural modernism were regarded as emblems of progress and prosperity. They eclipsed profound economic inequality and worsening social problems. As conditions deteriorated, abstraction was thrown into crisis, but Venezuela did not have a strong tradition of protest art. It was the task of artists in the twenty-first century to forge new directions. Castillo and Ordosgoitti do so by presenting a strong female body and imbuing her with agency, revealing a conviction in the power of art to effect social change.
Based in Brooklyn, New York, Deborah Castillo (b. 1971) has exhibited widely across Latin America, the United States, and Europe. A graduate of the Armando Reverón University Institute of Plastic Arts in Caracas, she has held residencies at Franklin Furnace, the Hemispheric Institute, and the London Print Studio. She is the subject of the recently published e-book Deborah Castillo: Radical Disobedience, published by HemiPress.
Érika Ordosgoitti (b. 1980) is a graduate of the Armando Reverón University Institute of Plastic Arts. She received the AICA award for young artists in Venezuela in 2016 and the MISOL Foundation award for young artists in Bogota in 2014. She has had solo exhibitions in Caracas and Bogota and participated in group exhibitions in Europe and Latin America.
Sponsors
The exhibition and event are funded in part by the Center for Cultural Analysis; Center for Latin American Studies; Department of Art History; Douglass Residential College; Rutgers Global; and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts. Co-sponsors: Art Library, Center for Latino Arts and Culture; Department of Arts and Design; Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies; Department of Women’s & Gender Studies; Institute for Research on Women; Institute for Women’s Leadership; Zimmerli Art Museum.
Image: Deborah Castillo, Slapping Power 1, 2018