Press Release
The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston will present two exhibitions for the summer of 2022; Kukuli Velarde: CORPUS and Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez: Pinturas de Casta and the Construction of American Identity. The exhibitions will be on view from Friday, May 13 to Saturday, July 16, 2022, in the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art's galleries located at 161 Calhoun Street in downtown Charleston, SC. The Halsey Institute's gallery hours are Monday through Saturday 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM and 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM on Thursdays, closed on Sundays. The Halsey Institute's galleries are open to the public and admission is free.
The exhibitions will be accompanied by a slate of programming, most of which is free and open to the public. Additionally, free staff-led tours will take place at 2:00 PM every Saturday during the exhibition unless superseded by a public program. No reservations are required. Free guided group tours for school groups and community organizations are offered through the Halsey Institute's Looking to See program.
ABOUT KUKULI VELARDE: CORPUS The Halsey Institute will debut Peruvian American artist Kukuli Velarde's CORPUS project in its entirety for the first time. CORPUS is comprised of ceramic and fabric works that encourage reflection on the meaning of survival in the face of colonialism. Fifteen ceramic sculptures, each with matching tapestries, will be presented in a symbolic representation of the annual Corpus Christi festival in Cusco, Perú. The sculptures reference indigenous pre-Columbian forms and iconographies in a visual representation of syncretic aesthetic, cultural, and religious traditions. CORPUS engages with and confronts Perú's Spanish colonial past, asserting that pre-Columbian sacred entities and the worldview they inhabit were not vanquished by Spanish conquerors, but instead cleverly blended with their Catholic counterparts, ensuring their survival. So too, have the diverse peoples of Perú and greater Latin America formed and reformed political, religious, and cultural identity in the shadow of centuries-long oppression. Velarde's CORPUS asks viewers to consider this resilience via her stunningly detailed and humorously thought-provoking work. Velarde raises fascinating questions about the inner life of art objects, as well as the exotic “Othering” of sacred rituals like Corpus Christi that now also serve as tourist attractions for visitors to Perú. In this complete realization, CORPUS explores issues of colonialism, cultural identity, aesthetics, and the performance of self. The Halsey Institute has produced an exhibition catalogue to accompany CORPUS. The publication features detailed photographs of the CORPUS sculptures, along with an introduction by Tey Marianna Nunn and essays by Halsey Institute director Katie Hirsch and Kukuli Velarde's mother, Alfonsina Barrionuevo.
ABOUT THE ARTIST Kukuli Velarde Kukuli Velarde is a Peruvian American artist based in Philadelphia, PA. Velarde is a multi-talented artist, working in ceramic, painting, drawing, and installation. Much of her work draws on pre-Columbian traditional forms and iconographies, highlighting colonized and syncretic identities and aesthetic systems. Velarde received a BFA from Hunter College in New York City. She is the recipient of such awards as the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2012), and Joan Mitchell Foundation grant (1997). Her work can be found in the collections of Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima, Perú; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, among many others. Kukuli Velarde's website is KukuliVelarde.com
ABOUT NANCY FRIEDEMANN-SÁNCHEZ: PINTURAS DE CASTA AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AMERICAN IDENTITY
The Halsey Institute will present works from Colombian American artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez's Casta Paintings series. Friedemann-Sánchez's paintings reference casta painting, a genre popularized in eighteenth-century Spanish Colonial Central and South America that purported to depict a racial and social taxonomy of children born of racially mixed couplings. Friedemann-Sánchez's contemporary casta paintings take inspiration from this problematic genre to reflect on the legacy of colonialism that lingers in the racial and social discrimination and marginalization present in her home country of Colombia and here in the United States. The paintings feature life-size tracings of female bodies adorned with floral imagery lifted from both the indigenous resin technique of mopa mopa and Spanish colonial iconography. Masks from across Latin America and the Caribbean are included to represent stereotypes born of colonial-era mixed-race classifications that continue to perpetuate today.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez is a Colombo-American, mid-career artist with an interdisciplinary practice. She grew up in Colombia as the child of a Colombian and a United States citizen and migrated to the US as an adult. Her art is about the curious and intense experience of having physically migrated, yet still having a piece of herself rooted in Colombia. She is creating an intersectional feminist visual novel that is a multifaceted project comprised of paintings, sculptures, objects, and mixed media that together—and in different voices—weave a synchronicity of dialogues, passages, and punctuations about hybridity and cultural ownership.
Friedemann-Sánchez is in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art; she participated at the 20 Congreso Internacional: La Experiencia Intelectual de las Mujeres en el Siglo XXI in 2012 in Mexico City. Shows include Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, Blue Star Contemporary, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, La Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador, Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska, Joslyn Art Museum, Portland Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, and Bronx Museum of the Arts.
Friedemann-Sánchez was awarded the Doctorow Prize in Painting, a Nebraska Arts Council grant, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a Puffin Foundation grant, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures grant, and was nominated to the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the United States Artists fellowships, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and to the Anonymous Was A Woman Award. She was a resident at Art Omi, Fountainhead, Tamarind Institute, Yaddo, Gasworks, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and Bronx Museum of the Arts.
Visit Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez's website at NancyFriedemann.com
