26/09. 10-12 a.m. Beverly Buchanan–Ruins and Rituals
Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) explored the relationship between memory—personal, historical, and geographical—and place. Engaging with the most vanguard movements of her time, including Land Art, Post-Minimalism, and feminism, she linked political and social consciousness to the formal aesthetics of abstraction. The talk at FLORA will explore the most comprehensive exhibition of Buchanan’s work to date: Beverly Buchanan–Ruins and Rituals presented at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in the Fall of 2016. This thirty-year survey presents approximately 200 objects, including sculpture, painting, photography, drawing, and notebooks of the artist’s writing as well as documentation of performances. Emphasizing how Buchanan’s work resisted easy categorization, this exhibition investigates her dialogue not only with a range of styles, materials, and movements, but also with gender, race, and identity. Works on view examine histories of locations where she lived and worked, including Florida, New York, and Georgia. According to Buchanan, “… a lot of my pieces have the word ‘ruins’ in their titles because I think that tells you this object has been through a lot and survived—that’s the idea behind the sculptures…it’s like, ‘Here I am; I’m still here!’ ”
27/09. 10-12 a.m. Marfa Sounding: A Residency Case Study
Marfa Sounding is a series of site-specific performances, sound installations, screenings, and conversations that explore the relationship between sound and landscape, movement, and sculpture. Focused on the manipulation and disruption of time in relation to architectural space and environment—from extended duration to the unpredictable frequencies of wind—the series situates this embodied exploration in the small Texas town of Marfa. Moving beyond the best-known history of this place as a site for the permanent installation of large-scale works by Judd and his contemporaries, this geographically and temporally bounded sounding engages complex histories of a community’s transformation. The project began with a 2015 curatorial residency at Fieldwork Marfa, a joint initiative of Nantes School of Art (France) and HEAD–Genève (Switzerland). This informal presentation at FLORA will introduce residents to the Fieldwork: Marfa residency program while tracing the path from residency to public exhibition.
Jennifer Burris is a curator and writer based in Bogotá, Colombia where she is director of Athenée Press. She has organized numerous live performances and film screenings in addition to exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and The Kitchen in New York City.
In 2015 she co-founded Marfa Sounding: an ongoing series of performances, sound installations, and talks in the town of Marfa, Texas that explores the relationship between music and sculpture. As a writer she has contributed to publications including The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Studies in French Cinema, Bomb Daily, Revista Código, Afterall Online, and Frieze as well as artist monographs for Brian Weil, Godfried Donkor, Alexandra Navratil, and Raphael Montañez Ortiz.
A graduate of the University of Cambridge (Ph.D) and Princeton University (A.B.), she was a 2010–2011 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program and the 2011–2013 Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania.
Evento apoyado por el Ministerio de Cultura – Programa Nacional de Concertación Cultural, IDARTES y Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo