https://carinamartinez.cargo.site Carina Martinez Sun, 04 Jan 2026 23:00:03 +0000 https://carinamartinez.cargo.site en https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/Info Wed, 08 Dec 2021 13:52:48 +0000 Carina Martinez https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/Info is a curator, writer, and researcher from McAllen, TX. Based in New York, she received a BA in Art History and Philosophy from St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX, and an MA in Curatorial Practice from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Her writing has been published in Art21 READ and Sculpture Magazine, and she was Assistant Editor of the publication&nbsp;Artists and the Unknown: Art21 Interviews with Artists (2025). Previously an Assistant Director and Associate at James Cohan Gallery, she has held curatorial roles at the Queens Museum, Art21, and currently the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she is the Rubio Butterfield Family Fellow and a member of the Whitney Biennial 2026 curatorial team. EmailInstagram https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/Curatorial-Projects Sun, 04 Jan 2026 22:05:38 +0000 Carina Martinez https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/Curatorial-Projects Forthcoming Juan Sánchez: A Survey, co-curated by Alejandro Anreus, Marcela Guerrero, and Tie Jojima, with Carina Martinez, co-organized by Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2027-28 Current Whitney Biennial 2026, co-curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, with Beatriz Cifuentes and Carina Martinez, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, 2026 Taller Granny Square (The Granny Square Workshop), co-founded by James Cohan and Carina Martinez, in partnership with Venezuelans &amp; Immigrants Aid, 2024-ongoing Past Into the Valley of Despair, Pfizer Building, Brooklyn, NY, 2022 From Aqui, from Alla, MACP Project Space, New York, NY, 2021 Do-Until Loop Parade, curated by 2022 MA Curatorial Practice team, 2021 https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/Catalogues-and-Publications Sun, 04 Jan 2026 22:38:14 +0000 Carina Martinez https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/Catalogues-and-Publications Whitney Biennial 2026, exhibition catalogue, co-published by Whitney Museum of American Art and Yale University Press, designed by STUDIO LHOOQ, March 2026 Artists and the Unknown: Art21 Interviews with Artists, co-published by Art21 and Gregory R. Miller &amp; Co, designed by Practice, January 2025 https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/Artist-Interviews-and-Reviews Sun, 04 Jan 2026 22:22:49 +0000 Carina Martinez https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/Artist-Interviews-and-Reviews “Armando Guadalupe Cortés,” Sculpture Magazine, December 9, 2025 “In the Studio: Eric-Paul Riege makes and unmakes in perpetuity,” Art21 READ, 2025 “In the Studio: Carolina Fusilier hears the invisible,” Art21 READ, 2024 “In the Studio: Michael Rakowitz renders lost artifacts into ghostly new forms,” Art 21 READ, 2023 https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/Proposals Thu, 16 Dec 2021 20:40:03 +0000 Carina Martinez https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/Proposals Puerta EscondidaA group exhibition at El Centro de las Artes de San Agustín, Oaxaca, Mexico Puerta Escondida showcases the work of Mexico-based women artists exploring hidden forms of communication between human and non-human worlds. Giving viewers access to the unseen and unheard voices of natural matter, each artist employs technology and speculative fiction to create new dimensions of ecological reality. The exhibition aims to contemplate alternate networks of connectivity between humanity and nature that expand our imagination of time, place, and future ecosystems. Artist Carolina Fusilier accesses language present within and around organic matter through what she calls “acts of espionage through sound.” Isla Eléctrica (Electric Island) is a multimedia installation that began when the artist recorded sounds from an abandoned hydro dam on the Veracruz-Oaxaca border. The installation amplifies the sound of water entering the pores of submerged clay sculptures that resemble an underwater city, inhabited by a fictional “metabolic community” of sea-dwellers. “Stability, durability… are terrestrial logics that we are leaving behind,” an inhabitant proclaims in a language composed of what humans can only perceive as the bubbling sounds of clay dissolving. Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola similarly creates sound sculptures and performances inspired by secret languages, such as Hildegard von Bingen’s Lingua Ignota (Unknown Language)—the oldest invented language created by a woman—and the Tibetan concept of terma—teachings that are hidden in the ground or within a rock. She explores speculative future languages created from sounds produced by rocks, leaves, and twigs found along the Oaxacan coastline, contemplating how letters might adapt to a new reality where our contemporary understanding of communication no longer exists. In another work, she collects sounds by scratching the ruins of a nearby archeological site. Guided by scientific drawings and field notes, this looped video performance becomes a gestural transcription and meditation on the traces of invisible knowledge. Inspired by her surroundings in Puerto Escondido, a seaside town in Oaxaca whose name translates to “hidden port,” Astrid Lutz creates portal-like sculptures that blend organic forms with industrial textures, such as aluminum honeycomb and photoluminescent surfaces. These structures fuse natural and human-made materials, invoking a hybridized visual language. Photographs of these sculptures on the Zicatela shoreline—one of the most dangerous surf beaches on the planet—convey a reality where technology and nature are enmeshed and transmutable. Puerta Escondida will take place at El Centro de las Artes de San Agustín, an ecological art space in the heart of Oaxaca dedicated to artistic experimentation and production. The exhibition will include a program of sound performances and poetry workshops led by the artists that furthers the institution’s commitment to developing interdisciplinary, environmentally conscious projects at a local and international level. A publication will also accompany the exhibition and feature texts that expand on the speculative worlds of "Puerta Escondida, MX," grounding it as a metaphysical network of sites accessible through the artists’ portals and mythologies. Katie Paterson: Deepening TimeInternational exhibition series&nbsp;hosted by Science Gallery Network Deepening Time is a series of international exhibitions that contemplates deep time through the conceptual art practice of Katie Paterson. The project aims to highlight how the works’ materiality and sensory-based qualities render geologic time humanly discernible, as well as engage viewers’ bodies to spark curiosity and kinship with the universe as it existed, and will one day exist again, without our witnessing. The title plays upon the term ‘deep time’ as well as describes the broadening of our conception of and connection to time through dimensions of the natural and the phenomenological. Several of Paterson’s works, to quote her life-long Ideas series of haiku poems, metaphorically construct “beach[es] made with sand from hourglasses.” They distill a notion of time that simultaneously destabilizes and grounds the common linear, anthropocentric understanding of it in a much vaster context, using the human senses as an entrypoint. In The Cosmic Spectrum (2019), Paterson sources scientific data to create a continuously spinning wheel of visible colors that depicts the universe’s starlight from the beginning of time toward a speculated future era. Similarly, To Burn, Forest, Fire (2021), a work that consists of a burning incense that simulates the smell of the world’s first-ever (and potentially, its eventual last) forest, paints a sublime olfactory scene of land before and after the way humans experience it today. These, along with Timepieces (2014), Vatnajökull (the sound of) (2007-08), and Lightbulb to Simulate Moonlight (2008), will be featured in the show as some of Paterson’s artworks that utilize concepts accessible through the senses to complicate and expand our awareness of, and thus our participation in, a fuller portrait of natural existence. Situated at the crossroads of science and art, and with nine university-led partnering gallery spaces around the world, Science Gallery Network is the ideal host institution for Deepening Time. SGN, with locations in Dublin, Atlanta, Bengaluru, Venice, and Melbourne to name a few, frequently organizes exhibitions around a general theme (Blood; Intimacy; Perfection) to which collaborating interdisciplinary artists respond with interpretations based in science and technology. I envision Deepening Time as being a string of exhibitions that take shape concurrently in various SGN locations with Paterson’s works as a point of commonality, scattered across the globe all at once. Each show, however, will also include a different selection of artists and researchers specific to the region in which it is exhibited that are responding to the theme of deep time and the senses. The purpose of this ambitious curatorial project is to complexify and unite conceptions of time across cultures and geographies in acknowledgment of the wide spectrum of histories, knowledges, and ever-evolving frameworks of time and humankind’s place within it. Wura-Natasha Ogunji: Sync and Swim A solo exhibition hosted by Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos, Nigeria and The Contemporary Austin in Austin, Texas Sync and Swim is a traveling solo exhibition of selected drawings and performance works by artist Wura-Natasha Ogunji. The show gathers works from throughout Ogunji’s career in an effort to examine the role of water as a recurring motif and formative inspiration in the Nigerian-American artist’s creative investigation into identity, gender, culture, and history. Existing between two homelands, the Atlantic Ocean becomes at once the wedge, the connective tissue, and the container of multitudes for Ogunji. Leaning into the endless depths of her self as ocean, the artist’s multidisciplinary practice seeks out through the bodily form the moments in which rules might be broken in exciting and imaginative ways, creating disruptions of everyday life and norms on the streets of Nigeria with her performances. Destabilizing space and time for herself, her performers, and those who witness them, the works encourage us to sync up to, rather than sink into, the unknowability of the possible. The first part of the exhibition consists of a collection of drawings by Ogunji that contemplate water as a fluid entry point into that which lies just beyond reach. The process of drawing itself, for Ogunji, is one of treading and testing the bounds of the unknown. Pulling thread through tracing paper, she begins to stitch together a composition before being fully aware of the nature of the idea. A title then emerges through the process and guides the overall direction and meaning of the work for her, like in the case of The proof, an undersea volcano, extraction, attraction, distraction (2017). This work’s sweeping, roughly horizontal lines trace a woman’s abstracted body--face, hands, lips, and ears--in graphite, ink, and threads of bright reds and blues. The titles’ words weave and settle into the drawings’ landscapes, sometimes literally, as in works like Atlantic (2016). A woman’s head leans off the page with words spouting from her ear: “Our lost ones line the sea... Our land ain’t Africa but the sand that is our ancestors’ bones.” The text instantly draws our attention to who we are really looking at by way of who is absent, pulling us in to think about the people it took to form the portrait before us. In Oyibo vs Herself [That's not the Atlantic; there's a disco ball between us.] (2013), she similarly “considers both the geographic and psychic distance between Africa and the Americas in order to speak about the possibilities that this immense Atlantic separation might allow.” The second part of the show exhibits performance and video works by Ogunji that use the materiality and poltics of water as a means for questioning the world as it exists and manifesting new ways women can exist in it. The return (2007), for instance, is a 50-second video work where the artist walks on water with twigs tied to the bare soles of her feet. The video begins with only the artist’s silhouette casted over the water, its murkiness rendering its depth indiscernible; nonetheless, she walks across the frame along the water’s surface, apparently defying gravity, as she makes ripples in the water that soon dissipate into stillness again. Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman? (2011) is an endurance performance that features Ogunji and participating female performers dragging water jugs attached to their ankles across Lagos. The women wore masks as a reference to the Egungun masquerade, a sacred tradition that prohibits women from participating. This performance allows women to imagine what it would be like to occupy a sacred, untouchable space in society carved for them, as their carrying of water through the city (as women traditionally do in Nigerian culture) takes on a new and transformative significance. beauty, poolside (2016) is another performance in which water becomes a central material in the fostering of possible worlds. Tethered to one another by a long lock of hair submerged in water, Ogunji and her collaborator Adeola Olagunju stand across a swimming pool from one another, themselves submerged in thoughts of joy, leisure, and imagination. This show will open at the Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos (CCAL), then travel to The Contemporary Austin in Austin, Texas. Ogunji has previously exhibited her work at CCAL in 2012 in a thematic solo show about love. Sync and Swim will introduce audiences to another integral facet of her multidisciplinary practice and philosophical inquiries, and, in hopes to connect her two homes across the ocean, the show will subsequently take shape later in Austin, Ogunji’s previous home in the United States between which she once split her life. Luis Camnitzer: Desire Lines&nbsp;An exhibitionary experiment in wayfinding hosted by MoMA PS1 Desire Lines: An Experiment in Wayfinding is a solo exhibition and curatorial project created in collaboration with conceptual artist Luis Camnitzer that seeks to investigate the question: What does an exhibition shaped by its audience’s learning, rather than for an audience, look like? The exhibition derives its title and curatorial strategy from an anecdote shared by Camnitzer about the moment he decided to abandon his architectural education after observing that a walkway through the school’s garden was not fulfilling its function: people preferred to make and take their own paths through the space over the one designed for them. These invented pathways are what architects and urban planners have come to call desire lines, which some value as historical records that “allow the past to directly inform the present,” or a metaphor for “the endless human desire to have choice [and] the importance of not having someone prescribe your path.” They are also suggestive of the infinite solutions and sightlines connected to a given problem or situation and what Camnitzer considers to be art’s unique potential to render those lines detectable, accessible, and possible in a future world. The show shares lineage with Camnitzer’s The Assignment Book exhibition held at Parsons New School for Design in 2011, which presented a series of the same name that prompted visitors to respond to the artworks’ conceptual prompts, questions, and conundrums on a piece of paper and attach them onto the gallery wall beside the works. Desire Lines takes this idea a step further into the curatorial, bringing the series together with other seminal works that span the artist’s long career, including Leftovers (1970); This Is a Mirror, You Are a Written Sentence (1966-1968); Timelanguage (2016); Fenster [Ventana, Window] (2001-2002); Somebody’s Fragment (1969); and The Form Generating the Content (1973–1997), all of which draw awareness to the politics of image- and meaning-making through a playful interrogation of language, semiotics, spatiality, and aesthetics. Known for championing multi-disciplinary contemporary art projects that are experimental by nature, and located inside a former public school, MoMA PS1 would be an ideal host for Desire Lines. Recentering the curatorial as both an artistic and pedagogical practice, the exhibition presents a space determined by its own public. Most of the art objects will be installed on movable walls, platforms, and overhead tracks that, with the help of professional art handlers-turned-gallery attendants, can be reconfigured in real-time. Viewers will be engaged in open conversations (by the attendants, Camnitzer, and/or me) about the works, and then the works will be moved according to the viewers’ responses and ideas, effectively generating alternate spatial relationships and lines of sight between the works throughout the course of the exhibition. The different configurations of the show will be recorded by drawing lines on the museum floor, alongside any other notes, ideas, questions, or messages that audiences wish to write and/or respond to on its surface. This experimental format aims to transform the exhibition space from a traditionally controlled, one-directional place for seeing and receiving information about art into a dynamic pedagogical tool for multichannel exchange through dialogue and movement. The hope for this project is to not only activate audiences’ thinking about concepts related to the works and the art of exhibition-making, but to likewise add new life to the widely collected and exhibited works’ biographies. Desire Lines furthers Camnitzer’s vision of the museum as a school by turning the exhibition space into a shifting classroom, its floor into a blackboard, and its visitors into the artist’s and curator’s collaborators. Edgar Arcenaux: Between Closure Between Closure is a solo exhibition of artworks by Edgar Arcenaux that examines the multidisciplinary artist’s investigation into the audience’s role in meaning-making through the modes of narrative, reference, and duration. The exhibition’s title refers to the term closure, defined in visual theorist Scott McCloud’s book Understanding Comics as the inference that naturally occurs within the “gutter” between the panels of a pictorial story-telling device, in which the viewer fills in sequential gaps of a story using their imagination. It also points to the sense of “getting closure,” or finding resolution to an unfinished story, as each of the exhibited works builds upon viewers’ perceptions and interpretations of facts related to an iconic figure, event, or idea. Between refers to everything leading up to the viewer’s reception of the work, the gutter between past and present where they have accrued their own personal archives of knowledge, information and moral judgments through experience. The gallery in which the artworks are witnessed and absorbed, then, serves as a liminal space between the ending of audiences’ previous formulations of an idea and the beginning of new ones. The exhibition is structured around three questions that the artist himself poses as part of his artistic process. The first section, How do we tell the stories that we tell? explores the ways in which narrative is used to manipulate historical and factual information. Arcenaux’s Library of Black Lies is an installation that brings together a collection of books and written materials--some crystallized shut--that are related to Black history, culture, and identities. Organized into a labyrinthine library, the work encourages audiences to wander, destabilize their perspective, and build their own stories from a collection of fragmented narratives.The second guiding question, What does the story say, and what does that say about the viewer? highlights the use of reference and iconography in Arcenaux’s practice. Triadic Drawings (1997-) is a series of captioned drawings composed of three sketches arranged horizontally. Each sketch portrays an idea or figure that is semantically related to the other two sketches and decenters the sequence in which the trio’s meaning is processed and decoded by the viewer. The viewer’s subjective familiarity and associations with the icons portrayed in the drawings ultimately determine the message that is communicated.&nbsp; The final section centers around the question: When does a story begin and when does it end? Exhibited here is a screening of the first performance of Until Until Until (2015), a play written and directed by Arcenaux that tells the untold story of the trauma experienced by actor Ben Vereen after his disastrous blackface performance at former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s inaugural ceremony. Arcenaux has emphasized that the audience’s presence was integral to the work, as their absence is what marked the downfall of Vereen's career decades before. Rather than host a live performance, Between Closure opts to display video documentation of the play to solidify its original audience as a necessary and permanent component of the work’s materiality, while also drawing attention to the current audiences’ role in keeping an artwork like Until, Until, Until alive through spectatorship. This section also features A Book and a Medal (2014), a sculptural work that consists of archival materials reproduced onto large mirror-surfaced panels and presents a lesser known story tied to the legacy of civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. While the work pushes audiences to complexify their understanding of a historical figure through firsthand witnessing of documents, it also contemplates how the meaning and identity of objects can transform over time, and insists that the viewer’s participation is directly implicated and literally reflected in that ongoing process. Shirin Neshat: Bound in Another’s ChainsA retrospective exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Bound in Another’s Chains is an exhibition of selected works by Shirin Neshat that contemplates the artist and filmmaker’s longstanding creative investigation into the unfamiliar. Neshat’s oeuvre can be interpreted as one large self-portrait, often representing herself whether through the employment of her own body, actors, or non-actor subjects in photography, video, and film. Paradoxically, Neshat’s practice evinces that to understand the self is to turn one’s attention to the unself. The exhibition traces unfamiliarity operating both at an internal and an external level in Neshat’s artistic practice: through the invocation of dreams, which reflect the unknown depths of subconscious fears and desires; and through her evocation of ‘the Other’ as a reflection of the self. The exhibition’s title borrows a line from a poem by the great Persian female poet Forough Farrokhzad (whom Neshat has quoted in her esteemed Women of Allah (1995) photograph series) that tells the story of a woman who continuously dreams of an unfamiliar face that evades her every effort to discover its identity. Although it reads like a love story, the poem arguably also conveys art’s capacity to reveal and contemplate the affects and afflictions that make us human, affirming Neshat’s belief that “by getting closer to other people’s pain, you cope with your own.” The first section of Bound in Another’s Chains exhibits works that demonstrate how the unfamiliar manifests in Neshat’s collaborative approaches. Our House is on Fire (2013), for instance, is a body of work inspired by the artist’s time spent in Egypt after the people’s revolution that captures emotive closeup portraits of citizens. Artnet describes the photo series as harnessing “what Neshat refers to as the ‘power in human expression,’ in which the individual gaze creates a connection between viewer and subject, between personal narrative and the collective human experience.” The realization of this project required the building of trust between her and her subjects over several interview sessions, which revealed to her how akin her experience of the Iranian revolution was to theirs despite leading different lives. Similarly, unfamiliarity is complexly conveyed in Neshat’s film Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017), which tells the story of an Iranian film director working outside of her homeland and struggling to make a film about the life of 20th-century Egyptian entertainer Oum Kulthum. Like in many of Neshat’s films, the protagonist is a stand-in for her own personal feelings, questions, and concerns about deepening understanding of one’s multi-hyphenate identity through processes of art-making and storytelling. The second section showcases works that explore manifestations of ‘the unfamiliar’ at an intrapersonal level. On view will be Neshat’s Illusions and Mirrors (2014), a black-and-white film that tells the story of a woman futilely chasing a shadow through the dunes of an empty beach, and marks a departure from the artist’s previously socio-political themes regarding Iran and Islam and enters the “very timeless and universal” realm of dreams and uncharted terrains of the psyche. The surrealist quality of this film and others such as Roja&nbsp;(2016) renders the subconscious as an isolated, uninhabitable, yet eerily familiar and infinite place. Neshat maintains, “Our dreams are where our fears live,” and it is our fears that most earnestly reflect who we are. Bound in Another’s Chains will take shape in the second- and fourth-floor galleries of the Guggenheim’s extension tower. Connecting the two levels will be Neshat’s Land of Dreams (2018), a multi-faceted project that straddles both of the exhibition’s conceptions of the unfamiliar. This epic installation will display over 100 framed portraits dangling at various heights from the museum’s rotunda ceiling by intertangled chains, while the project’s film will be shown in a black-box space on the fourth floor. While this exhibition serves as an overdue moment to celebrate the breadth of Shirin Neshat’s artistic and cinematic contributions inside a major NYC art institution, it is equally a meditation on the interconnectedness that underlies each human experience and aims to inspire solidarity and compassion for the contradictions that exist within and around every one of us. https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/Essays Thu, 16 Dec 2021 22:16:23 +0000 Carina Martinez https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/Essays Qué poca vergüenza (No ay pedo ay peda wei)Review of Estelle Maisonett’s&nbsp;Todos Somos Iguales, 2017 I read somewhere once that shame is a conditioned emotion. Psychology Today calls it a contagious feeling that arises “when we anticipate being viewed as lacking or inadequate in our intellect or abilities,” “a clear signal that our positive feelings have been interrupted.” Driven by the threat of social exclusion and the human instinct to survive, we seem to avoid feeling shame out of fear of admitting that we are what the world around us has deemed punishable. My mother was regularly chastised for speaking Spanish when she and her family first immigrated from Colombia to Connecticut in the 1970s. One time at her Catholic elementary school, she didn’t know how to say that she needed to use the restroom in English. She begged the only bilingual student in her class to help her translate, but the girl only teased her and turned back around. The teacher nun yelled at my mom to get up and put her nose on the chalkboard as punishment for talking. She was hit repeatedly with a meter stick in front of the class before being sent to walk home alone, the urine still running down her leg. It makes sense why she hadn’t told me this story until a few years ago, why she never prioritized teaching me Spanish as a child, and why when she speaks English there is lingering pause. By the time she shared this story, I had already found shame in and all around me growing up in the borderlands of South Texas. Despite the majority of my classmates being raised between Mexico and the US, our public school system also discouraged Spanish speaking at school. Except, in the Rio Grande Valley we don’t speak Spanish, we speak Spanglish -- pocho. My childhood friend, whose family also came from South America, couldn’t stand the bastardization of Spanish and English (almost as much as she couldn’t stand to remember that she was born and raised in the US). A language purist, she criticized and overcorrected my mixing up of words and conjugations. I quickly grew to resent my parents for not teaching me Spanish properly, a contribution to my own inability, my inadequacy, to “authentically” claim roots. Estelle Maisonett is among one of several people I’ve bonded with in my adult life over the internalized shame that permeates Latinx communities for not being “Hispanic enough” (read: too American). “When I’m with my Latina friends they make fun of me and call me ‘white girl’ because I’m lighter skinned and can’t keep up with Spanish conversations sometimes,” she tells me over the phone. “But when I’m the only Latinx person in a group show, suddenly I’m an authority on Día de los Muertos and all things Mexican.” The multidisciplinary artist is based in the Bronx and was born to Mexican and Puerto Rican parents who were raised in Harlem. Having always lived in New York, Maisonett’s multicultural identity is informed not by having come from someplace else, but by the relationships, environments, and objects that continuously shape her selfhood. This is the inspiration for her artistic practice, which relies on the use of found objects, photography, and sourced clothing to construct life-size collages that contemplate the external forces that tell us who we are. Todos Somos Iguales (2017) is a mixed-media work that tells of Maisonett’s struggle with negotiating Americanness. Created on a deteriorated US flag that she found rotting in a utility closet at a public school, the work reads in Spanish: “We Are Americans, We Are Mexicans, and Together, We Are Human.” The words are a meditation on the common requirement in US public schools to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, despite the irony that “liberty and justice for all” does not reflect the reality of innumerous immigrants. Addressing the word “indivisible,” Maisonett’s declaration defies grammar rules by pairing the plural verb Somos (We Are) with the singular noun Human (You Are), and suggests the playful reimagining of grammar rules as a tool for challenging cultural binaries. However, the work also alludes to Maisonett’s own struggle with defining her multicultural upbringing, sharing that, “The American Flag has always made me uncomfortable. It doesn't feel like a symbol that represents me or one I identify with, even though I have grown up and lived in the US my entire life.” Home in a Box Meditations on Lingfei Ren’s&nbsp;2D, 4D, 6D, 7D (2020). For the last week I’ve co-presented an at-home exhibition from the inside of a Brooklyn apartment that has been uneasy to call “home” since I began subletting seven months ago. After signing off of the fourth and final talk, I packed the artworks up along with the rest of my stuff. Fittingly featured in the exhibition is artist Lingfei Ren’s sculptural work titled 2D, 4D, 6D, 7D (2020), which contemplates the subjectivization of rented living space. Caught between the generic and the personal, the same unit from different floors within an apartment building is superimposed onto itself. Ren stacks the various tenants’ furniture and belongings between numerous sheets of acrylic, creating an image that appears as if the only person who occupies the room might be a hoarder. Stranger tenants collide their most personal bubbles to compose a final picture that is as crowded as the very notion of a prefab space. I’m reminded of a picture I took after closing the door on my first apartment in Austin. The urge to capture it must have come more from disbelief than sentimentality, as I bore witness to the malleability of a space that so convincingly felt like mine and yet so readily reverted back to its intended function as an indistinguishable, duplicable object. For the first time since moving, I remembered the moment when I first entered the empty space and thought, “Wow, this looks weird,” which, ironically, likely happened just hours after the last tenant had gazed uneasily and closed the door behind them. Yes, Ren’s work operates as a literal composite of several existences within the same spatial bounds at once (above and below each other) but it is also a pictorial representation of the countless lives and ghosts of tenants past that rented homes apathetically collect and discard. In this way, the prefab apartment to the impermanent occupant is not unlike the gallery space to the curator. We pour our labor, resources, and idiosyncratic care into the exhibitions we painstakingly plan and research. The moment then arrives to present our hard work and that of our invited artists, whose presences vis-a-vis their artworks help render the gallery into an intellectually and emotionally nurturing world. It transforms into our world for a time, for exactly however long time allows it to remain ours. But the deinstall--the moving, shipping + handling of things--requires the markings of this moment be scrubbed from the gallery’s walls, whose plastered surfaces must be matched and patched as seamlessly as a human hand can make them. With that, these walls are passed on to construct another’s dream. The transient nature of the gallery and the cookie-cutter apartment blur together in the case of the at-home exhibition-in-a-box. Two years to the date, I’m again moving out during finals week. This time there’s no moving company or heavy furniture to lug, just suitcases and a paranoid subletter to appease. Having slept in someone else’s bed for so many months, I’ve always known that this place was never mine to call home. Does that mean handing over the keys should feel any easier? https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/Press Sun, 04 Jan 2026 23:00:03 +0000 Carina Martinez https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/Press Ania Szremski, “ Whitney Biennial 2026,” 4Columns, April 10, 2026. “Latine.x Curatorial Practices and Accessibility Panel: Fabulating Belongings,” Virtual Symposium for Disability and Accessibility at Yale University, April 7, 2026. “Current Mood,” SVA Visual Arts Journal, Spring/Summer 2026. Nicholas Frank, “Two Texas-Born Artists Included in 2026 Whitney Biennial,” Glasstire, December 17, 2025. Maxwell Rabb, “Whitney Biennial announces artists for its 2026 edition,” Artsy, December 15, 2025. The Latinx Project, “Carina Martinez: Curating Accessible Art Experiences,” Intervenxions, March 4, 2025. https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/ITVOD Wed, 08 Dec 2021 13:53:50 +0000 Carina Martinez https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/ITVOD Into the Valley of Despair Pfizer Building, Brooklyn, NY | April 14 - 17, 2022Anna Witt, Chun Hua Catherine Dong, Julian Louis Phillips, Florian Aschka &amp; Larissa Knopp, Kim Kielhofner, Mia Raadik <img width="5775" height="3850" width_o="5775" height_o="3850" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0e747616da402dc958b88f2fb9c2c70d7466d763188cbc09ae0924b5e527a77d/DSCF5944.jpg" data-mid="148928728" border="0" alt="Installation view, Into the Valley of Despair, Pfizer Building, Brooklyn, NY, April 14-17, 2022." data-caption="Installation view, Into the Valley of Despair, Pfizer Building, Brooklyn, NY, April 14-17, 2022." src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0e747616da402dc958b88f2fb9c2c70d7466d763188cbc09ae0924b5e527a77d/DSCF5944.jpg" /> <img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/41ca8d4b8aa0497e540aa328685bab3374505c258977754c8860e46d2506181d/DSCF5958.jpg" data-mid="148928738" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/41ca8d4b8aa0497e540aa328685bab3374505c258977754c8860e46d2506181d/DSCF5958.jpg" /> <img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a9a21f271747b479ecc597d5ef613c9b60ef9deeee509e2fa74db51e86c58b7e/DSCF5930.jpg" data-mid="148928722" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a9a21f271747b479ecc597d5ef613c9b60ef9deeee509e2fa74db51e86c58b7e/DSCF5930.jpg" /> <img width="4000" height="6000" width_o="4000" height_o="6000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fbef4fa016f3484a1a03b5743250287f73914fab60b578c7e96632816ff627d2/DSCF5919.jpg" data-mid="148928714" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fbef4fa016f3484a1a03b5743250287f73914fab60b578c7e96632816ff627d2/DSCF5919.jpg" /> <img width="3629" height="5443" width_o="3629" height_o="5443" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4b7f3fae360a9a81405d2ebc9b645009f8c529ff0e2320881f0636ca9082ceac/DSCF5897.jpg" data-mid="148928709" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4b7f3fae360a9a81405d2ebc9b645009f8c529ff0e2320881f0636ca9082ceac/DSCF5897.jpg" /> <img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9d81a4c2964494c071cfeb66bff634099cdb303f3797797be4a1b3eda5616beb/DSCF5951.jpg" data-mid="148928732" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9d81a4c2964494c071cfeb66bff634099cdb303f3797797be4a1b3eda5616beb/DSCF5951.jpg" /> <img width="5500" height="3667" width_o="5500" height_o="3667" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/21bfcc3c8b0da90b8a51b152d275a22fa24f9d4aea680e8544f92e4f774ddb51/DSCF5900.jpg" data-mid="148928711" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/21bfcc3c8b0da90b8a51b152d275a22fa24f9d4aea680e8544f92e4f774ddb51/DSCF5900.jpg" /> <img width="5717" height="3811" width_o="5717" height_o="3811" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9041dc45cb40fa568c3be09be3f8aadf5625bd944fb11bc3b6001e0a93c95986/DSCF5873.jpg" data-mid="148928697" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9041dc45cb40fa568c3be09be3f8aadf5625bd944fb11bc3b6001e0a93c95986/DSCF5873.jpg" /> <img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/622302353dc5338e70512137572ebf5614a3b02d771714237a28508389a45c6f/DSCF5924.jpg" data-mid="148928716" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/622302353dc5338e70512137572ebf5614a3b02d771714237a28508389a45c6f/DSCF5924.jpg" /> <img width="5680" height="3787" width_o="5680" height_o="3787" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/28b5cc7cbead4245285363b7dfd3e4677e1a5026e16e4e70dab389aaf48ce9f5/DSCF5963.jpg" data-mid="148928740" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/28b5cc7cbead4245285363b7dfd3e4677e1a5026e16e4e70dab389aaf48ce9f5/DSCF5963.jpg" /> Into the Valley of Despair stages a conversation between broad artistic works and practices that contemplate the role discomfort plays in art and processes of learning. The project highlights artists’ attempts to capture what fundamentally lies outside of conceivability, challenging themselves or their audiences to remain vulnerable in approaching the unknown. In surveying the overlapping territories of discomfort and truth-seeking, this curatorial project seeks the points where new understandings of the world destabilize previous worlds. Into the Valley of Despair argues that embracing discomfort is not only healthy and necessary for (un)learning, but also for perceiving a more just world through art. Irit Rogoff’s essay “The Expanded Field” argues that today’s shifting landscapes of art, culture, and knowledge production necessitate that “each idea or concept we take up be subjected to pressures from other modes of knowledge and of knowing—it cannot simply stay within its own comfortable paradigm and celebrate itself and its achievements.” The solution lies not in just including underrepresented perspectives through the language of multiplicity and diversity; rather, it is in reconsidering the situation entirely as a series of enactments of what Rogoff calls “an epistemological crisis”— an “exiting from previous definitions, refusing moral inscription… risking a capacity for misunderstanding.” Arguably at the core of contemporary art’s—and society’s—needs is an intentional rappelling into the contradictions, injustices, and enclosures of the past and present, which begins with us making peace with their coexistence. Into the Valley of Despair takes as a point of departure the common feeling of discomfort that arises when we adopt new ideas that challenge what has previously been understood or indubitably accepted. In 1999, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger collected data across four studies that measured participants’ skills through tests of grammar and logic, and found that those who scored in the bottom percentile consistently believed they scored much higher. However, as those participants improved their skills, their metacognitive competence increased and they were better able to recognize the limitations of their abilities. Dunning and Kruger developed a graph to represent this phenomenon: Plotted on a y-axis labeled “Confidence” and an x-axis labeled “Competence,” a line sharply plummets from its highest point to its lowest, the “Valley of Despair.” Although the descending stretch between these points goes unnamed, it is comparable to the notion of collective disorientation that artist and cultural theorist Hito Steyerl discusses in her essay “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective.” Using linear perspective as a metaphor for dominant, colonially rooted paradigms of seeing, Steyerl hypothesizes that contemporary societies are increasingly witnessing the collapse of the illusion of a stable horizon line, leaving us in a collective state of free fall. Caught in the crossfire of contradicting ideas, one must choose to sink or swim (or sync and swim) alongside them. To survive and remain open to what these transformations entail for individual and collective growth means to slow down and feel out the curves of the valley, a zone of perpetual remapping where uncertainty and radical possibility live like neighbors. The works featured in Into the Valley of Despair suggest that, rather than wince and turn away from the destabilizing truth of one’s limited purview, embarking on a winding journey through the valley with openness—waiting, listening, experimenting—might be the most sustainable path that one could take in pursuit of transformative justice. Seven participating artists attempt to highlight that which fundamentally lies outside of sight lines by challenging themselves, their subjects, or their audiences to remain vulnerable in considering new perceptions, roles, and realms. The works also share elements of documentation, each capturing moments of social exchange that involve the complicating of private and public, intrapersonal and interpersonal, subjective and objective.Read the full exhibitiion catalog essay here. Featured Artworks Kim Kielhofner, Third Reading, 2017, from the Reading Patterns series, video, 11 min. Anna Witt, Radical Thinking, 2021, two-channel installation, looped video installation with two monitors on podiums. Anna Witt, Body in Progress, 2018, 5-channel video installation.Larissa Kopp and Florian Aschka, Private Property, 2021, two embroidered textile fabric flags and site-specific photo documentation, approx. 60 x 84 in. each. Chun Hua Catherine Dong, I Have Been There, 2015-ongoing, performance-based photograph series, 40 × 32 in. each, documenting 35 cities; virtual reality-rendered video element.Mia Raadik, Autoportrait, 2020, interactive installation. Mia Raadik, Self Care, 2020, sculpture, 10 bowls overflowing with shaving foam. Julian Louis Phillips, The Strategic Response Group (TSRG), 2022, live performance. https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/FAFA Wed, 08 Dec 2021 13:53:55 +0000 Carina Martinez https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/FAFA From Aqui, from AllaMACP Project Space, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY |&nbsp;March 25 - April 5, 2021 Albany Andaluz, Estelle Maisonett, Aida Lizalde <img width="5782" height="3855" width_o="5782" height_o="3855" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c0526310b4f61aa7d9d3d7a3003963971fdd97f2f9a75430a97dc7073c0fb77d/110.jpg" data-mid="126835373" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c0526310b4f61aa7d9d3d7a3003963971fdd97f2f9a75430a97dc7073c0fb77d/110.jpg" /> <img width="5763" height="3842" width_o="5763" height_o="3842" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c7c107cf9d09fd7f8b1bc156806ceb512d3b5e48db970f32664f99f1a6b4ecb8/111.jpg" data-mid="126835371" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c7c107cf9d09fd7f8b1bc156806ceb512d3b5e48db970f32664f99f1a6b4ecb8/111.jpg" /> <img width="5543" height="3695" width_o="5543" height_o="3695" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2db79f62d94d225552d21576a39327254d9bf460151089865bee9289be82e709/112.jpg" data-mid="126835369" border="0" alt="Installation view, From Aqui, from Alla, " data-caption="Installation view, From Aqui, from Alla, " src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2db79f62d94d225552d21576a39327254d9bf460151089865bee9289be82e709/112.jpg" /> <img width="5458" height="3639" width_o="5458" height_o="3639" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fb1e2a406badf37bf19bfbeb0ad840a0fffb67c39f3686985d2d7c50aca62fab/113.jpg" data-mid="126835366" border="0" alt="Installation view, From Aqui, from Alla, MACP Project Space, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, March 25 - April 5, 2021." data-caption="Installation view, From Aqui, from Alla, MACP Project Space, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY, March 25 - April 5, 2021." src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fb1e2a406badf37bf19bfbeb0ad840a0fffb67c39f3686985d2d7c50aca62fab/113.jpg" /> <img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/48c66dc16b9fa49650a2c28c6f3638bbd15f2e6fe3723045d0dac9956bb55751/114.jpg" data-mid="126835364" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/48c66dc16b9fa49650a2c28c6f3638bbd15f2e6fe3723045d0dac9956bb55751/114.jpg" /> <img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/af256211a84a8f39ba919cc6972a0b9cdc14254a0c781d196069aeffd4dd742b/115-1.jpg" data-mid="126835352" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/af256211a84a8f39ba919cc6972a0b9cdc14254a0c781d196069aeffd4dd742b/115-1.jpg" /> <img width="5651" height="3767" width_o="5651" height_o="3767" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/25880de2233ed25e9d3a2e4c659310487d286e3e1c3739c053ce0d95904f59be/117.jpg" data-mid="126835361" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/25880de2233ed25e9d3a2e4c659310487d286e3e1c3739c053ce0d95904f59be/117.jpg" /> <img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1ccf2bf4b5e209c172445fcf7e8328cb315df5ed89271dd88bb6c6c3434aa3c0/131.jpg" data-mid="126835340" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1ccf2bf4b5e209c172445fcf7e8328cb315df5ed89271dd88bb6c6c3434aa3c0/131.jpg" /> <img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6ad1352936754c5873b656c6b068f77a872eaa115c1b682aaa43d56834e4b890/130.jpg" data-mid="126835344" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6ad1352936754c5873b656c6b068f77a872eaa115c1b682aaa43d56834e4b890/130.jpg" /> <img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/19d2c8dbdaf9a318df43f23373ee4b5ba0ebfdfdfed90284d3e3e62e188ab05b/118.jpg" data-mid="126835360" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/19d2c8dbdaf9a318df43f23373ee4b5ba0ebfdfdfed90284d3e3e62e188ab05b/118.jpg" /> <img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6fbd90cec71912d63f38a506ac1a9cefcbc2a251557bac6c0744c2f765cbcb52/116.jpg" data-mid="126835362" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6fbd90cec71912d63f38a506ac1a9cefcbc2a251557bac6c0744c2f765cbcb52/116.jpg" /> For many people of Latin American descent who were born or raised in the United States, fluency in the Spanish language is often perceived as an indicator of cultural authenticity and authority. Likewise, those who immigrate to the U.S. often feel pressured to become proficient in English or otherwise risk cultural and social isolation. The role that language plays in the Latinx context is one that could either unite or further alienate an individual from their cultural orientation. From Aqui, from Alla is an exhibition that contemplates the complex relationship between language and multicultural identity formation by investigating how Latinx artists Albany Andaluz, Estelle Maisonett, and Aida Lizalde each utilize language—English, Spanish, written, spoken, visual, and otherwise—to navigate and negotiate their hybridized selves.The exhibition’s title is inspired by the popular 1970 folk song called No Soy de Aquí Ni Soy de Allá (I Am Not from Here, Nor Am I from There) written by the late Argentine singer-songwriter Facundo Cabral. The lyric has since been borrowed and stretched by a variety of&nbsp;writers, musicians, and artists to describe the notion of in-betweenness that is broadly characteristic of the Latinx experience. Here, it is playfully rewritten in Spanglish, a blend of English and Spanish widely spoken among Latinx communities across the nation, and grammatically altered to reflect an attitude of acceptance and ownership of the multiple inherited environments, ideologies, and sayings that make us who we are. The exhibition features an interactive element that allows viewers to select any of over 50 musical covers of Cabral’s song to demonstrate the breadth and diversity of this shared experience. From Aqui, from Alla aims to stage a conversation among the practices of three artists who each imaginatively perceive written, spatial, and material languages as extensions of their Latinx identities in such a way that transcends the simple bifurcation of speaking only Spanish or English. Rather than mourn what is often deemed “lost” when one lives at the crossroads of two&nbsp;or more cultural landscapes, this exhibition aims to celebrate the beauty in existing as a breathing collage of several legacies. <img width="3797" height="5696" width_o="3797" height_o="5696" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9f0fedd2a5e82768edb7eb70161e4d6d1b4028195df16eb56e7115342501e13f/115-2.jpg" data-mid="126835354" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9f0fedd2a5e82768edb7eb70161e4d6d1b4028195df16eb56e7115342501e13f/115-2.jpg" /> <img width="4000" height="6000" width_o="4000" height_o="6000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/754dc16cf3ee2bc1d8de7330459015358f55d32bbc1edead23dca7eb55618398/120.jpg" data-mid="126835358" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/754dc16cf3ee2bc1d8de7330459015358f55d32bbc1edead23dca7eb55618398/120.jpg" /> <img width="6000" height="4000" width_o="6000" height_o="4000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8df04e1805b72783598fabd24c460928f9b55f10fb62d6b3cda7a1dba35a3f9e/124.jpg" data-mid="126835355" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8df04e1805b72783598fabd24c460928f9b55f10fb62d6b3cda7a1dba35a3f9e/124.jpg" /> Multidisciplinary artist Albany Andaluz incorporates collected objects into mixed-media works that are expressive of her split upbringing between New York and the Dominican Republic, as well as her interest in meshing together high- and low-brow visual cultures. In her piece titled pley (2020) (left), Andaluz paints the texture of a city sidewalk marked with hopscotch numbers onto recycled fabrics passed onto her by a family member. The title wittily connects the meaning of the word “play” as it is used in the Dominican Republic to describe baseball and its use in a US context to describe neighborhood games.&nbsp; <img width="5277" height="3518" width_o="5277" height_o="3518" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f2bde3847e68ae0fa5f5067d708c37e5c186cc1dc1116da8100c63c38cf8c69d/DSCF5611.jpg" data-mid="126852334" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f2bde3847e68ae0fa5f5067d708c37e5c186cc1dc1116da8100c63c38cf8c69d/DSCF5611.jpg" /> <img width="4000" height="6000" width_o="4000" height_o="6000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ba40cb60d60314b224b12a5659fe88881787aca736430231432270d6a4711861/125.jpg" data-mid="126835351" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ba40cb60d60314b224b12a5659fe88881787aca736430231432270d6a4711861/125.jpg" /> <img width="3575" height="5363" width_o="3575" height_o="5363" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/237692a4eeaa15618d7b21e5ce29f19284d4d626dd4f98281a748877f63ff733/114-1.jpg" data-mid="126835342" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/237692a4eeaa15618d7b21e5ce29f19284d4d626dd4f98281a748877f63ff733/114-1.jpg" /> Estelle Maisonett is a Bronx-based Mexican-Puerto Rican artist whose practice investigates how personal ties to objects and built surroundings inform preconceived notions of identity by incorporating found materials into collage. This mixed-media work (left) was created on a deteriorated US flag and in Spanish reads: “We Are Americans, We Are Mexicans, and Together, We Are Human.” The piece is a meditation on the common requirement in US public schools to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, despite the irony that “liberty and justice for all” does not reflect the reality of innumerous immigrants. Alluding to the word “indivisible,” Maisonett’s declaration defies grammar rules by pairing the plural verb Somos (We Are) with the singular noun Human (You Are), and suggests the playful reimagining of language as a tool for embracing one’s hybrid identity. <img width="4000" height="6000" width_o="4000" height_o="6000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ead37064bc958d370ad14ab5ebe006171dfbf75321f3f8ceb9fbb033acde4581/DSCF5607.jpg" data-mid="126852336" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ead37064bc958d370ad14ab5ebe006171dfbf75321f3f8ceb9fbb033acde4581/DSCF5607.jpg" /> <img width="3978" height="5967" width_o="3978" height_o="5967" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8bfca75794f92b4d055061e656db868fb100584f8f825105a0d7f36b8630627c/121.jpg" data-mid="126835357" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8bfca75794f92b4d055061e656db868fb100584f8f825105a0d7f36b8630627c/121.jpg" /> Aida Lizalde is a Mexican-American artist who draws upon childhood experiences of living as an undocumented immigrant to create works that explore themes of identity, decolonization, and multiculturalism. In the sculptural work titled Binomial (2019) (left), the artist grapples with being of both European and indigenous descent by combining ancient and modern systems of language. Stringing together ceramic beads &nbsp;etched with the Mayan number symbols for one and zero, Lizalde writes in binary code a sentence in Spanish that translates in English as: “I am not indigenous I am.” This declaration of self stands as a rejection to identify as only one part of her ancestry, as well as an affirmation of her existence as a mix of cross-racial blood, as herself in all her pieces. https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/Taller-Granny-Square Sun, 29 Dec 2024 19:27:40 +0000 Carina Martinez https://carinamartinez.cargo.site/Taller-Granny-Square Taller Granny Square (The Granny Square Workshop) <img width="2550" height="2550" width_o="2550" height_o="2550" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b05efd839cb3e16752a7320f21e01d1786a8003b6fc31bf42c44e7712a206437/GSW-handout_square-crochet-thing_Page_1.jpg" data-mid="223918605" border="0" alt="Portraits of 2024 workshop cohort. Courtesy the participants. Photo by Carina Martinez; Granny Squares for Asylum Seekers Benefit Party event. Photo courtesy of Venezuelans and Immigrants Aid, NYC, 2024." data-caption="Portraits of 2024 workshop cohort. Courtesy the participants. Photo by Carina Martinez; Granny Squares for Asylum Seekers Benefit Party event. Photo courtesy of Venezuelans and Immigrants Aid, NYC, 2024." src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b05efd839cb3e16752a7320f21e01d1786a8003b6fc31bf42c44e7712a206437/GSW-handout_square-crochet-thing_Page_1.jpg" /> <img width="1344" height="896" width_o="1344" height_o="896" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3824c1842a00cedf908535d63c96a3c0c9756b96260cf6923d535ad225b6a883/Granny-Square-benefit-party.gif" data-mid="223918603" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3824c1842a00cedf908535d63c96a3c0c9756b96260cf6923d535ad225b6a883/Granny-Square-benefit-party.gif" /> Taller Granny Square (The Granny Square Workshop) is an ongoing community project cofounded by Jim Cohan and Carina Martinez in partnership with Venezuelans and Immigrants Aid NYC (VIA), a Manhattan-based non-profit committed to helping Latin American asylum-seekers establish healthy and stable lives. The Granny Square Workshop, a biweekly crochet class that gives newly arrived migrants from Latin America a safe space to learn a creative skill, was designed to empower VIA’s community through relationship- and skill-building practices. The participants, many of whom were complete crochet beginners, have learned the “Granny Square” technique and how to apply it to create various wares. Not only does this versatile skill open new avenues of income for the participants and their families, but it also presents a chance to forge new friendships while engaging in a therapeutic activity. During each two-hour session, participants are provided crochet materials, step-by-step lessons by experienced instructors, and coffee and snacks. At the end of each session, each crocheter is compensated $20 for their time plus a $6 stipend to cover commuting costs. The first cycle of sessions took place from March to May, and the second ran from June to August. From September to November, a batch of participants and the program’s three instructors worked together to produce a set of nine blankets, which were exhibited and available for purchase at the Granny Squares for Asylum Seekers Benefit Party, which took place on Wednesday, November 20, 2024. 100% of the crochet ware profits go to their makers and 100% of the Benefit Party ticket sales have gone to the funding of a 2025 cycle of workshops.