Joseph Liatela Artist Lecture and Embodied Movement Workshop

Joseph Liatela is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, performance, and installation. He will speak about his practice and how he evokes spaces of nightlife, religion, and memorial as sites of communal power and struggle, joy and anguish, acceptance and salvation, and most of all, remembrance. With a background in printmaking and sculpture, ephemera and trace are central components to Liatela’s practice.

Those whose histories have been excluded from the official archive must often look to the traces left behind in order to unearth one’s lineages. Alternative forms of citation and narrative--such as memory and performance--become how one orients oneself within a larger collective history. Tracing these ephemeral threads allows for the weaving of alternate lifeworlds. Through employing the visual languages of cultural spaces of simultaneous belonging and alienation, as well as the implied presence of an absence, Liatela aims to expand the definition of the sacred to include the architectures, bodies, and relationships it is rarely attributed to.

After the talk there will be a participatory component to collaboratively explore these ideas in movement, together.

Joseph Liatela is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. Using performance, sculpture, and video, he makes work that examines issues of biopolitics, memorial, trans and queer subjectivities, and collective movement.

Liatela has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Marli Motsumoto (São Paulo), Proyecto Galería (Mexico City), Galerie Du Montparnasse (Paris), Denniston Hill (New York), Human Resources (Los Angeles), The Jewish Museum (New York), Leslie-Lohman Museum (New York), The Monmouth Museum (Lincroft), and Marian Goodman Gallery (New York), among others. His debut museum solo exhibition Nothing Under Heaven was presented at George Segal Galleries (Montclair) in 2022.

Liatela earned a BFA with distinction from California College of the Arts and an MFA in sculpture and expanded media from Columbia University. He has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, The Banff Centre, California College of the Arts, Columbia University, Artist Grant, the Van Lier Fellowship, and was a finalist for the Found Work Artist Prize in 2021. His writing has been published by the Leslie-Lohman Museum Journal, Oxford University Press, and forthcoming with Duke University Press. Liatela’s work has been featured in Artsy, The Leslie-Lohman Museum Journal, SF MoMA’s Open Space, EMERGENCY Index, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, Artforum, and Art & Education.

Current and recent exhibitions include Faith By Night at SPACES in Cleveland, Ohio, and Ex-Voto at Fragment Gallery in New York City. This fall he will participate in Pacific Standard Time Los Angeles in the exhibition Scientia Sexualis at ICA LA curated by Jennifer Doyle and Jeanne Vaccaro.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Pratt Institute Libraries Alumni Reading Room, 200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, United States