About this Event
How is the past present in our understanding of the Americas? Presenting colonial paintings from the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation’s Art of the Spanish Americas collection in dialogue with contemporary sculpture, textiles, photography, painting, and mixed-media installations by artists from across the Americas and the Philippines, the exhibition Pasados Presentes: Cultural Memory in the Americas asks how visual and material culture shape the memory and identity of the Americas and whose stories are preserved, obscured, or reimagined within historical narratives.
Our opening program will celebrate exhibition artists Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Ronny Quevedo, and Sandy Rodriguez. They will discuss how pre-Hispanic and colonial art forms and materials inform their contemporary practices. The conversation will be moderated by exhibition curators Jesús Escobar, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in the Humanities, and Kyle Stephan, Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University.
Drop by the Block on the day of the program to explore the exhibition. The museum will remain open from 11 am until 6 pm.
Programs are open to all, on a first-come, first-served basis. RSVPs are not required but are appreciated.
OPENING CELEBRATION LOCATIONS, SCHEDULE, AND PARKING INFORMATION:
11:00 am-6:00 pm Open galleries at The Block
2:00-3:30 pm -- Opening Program, Galvin Recital Hall. Seating is first-come, first-served.
The Block Museum of Art is located at 40 Arts Circle Drive on the Evanston campus of Northwestern University. Our opening program at 2:00 pm will be held in Galvin Recital Hall at the Bienen School of Music (70 Arts Circle Dr). The location is adjacent to the Block Museum. A campus map is here.
Free parking is available all day in the open lot south of the museum and the South Campus Parking Garage (1847 Campus Drive). These parking lots are a 5-minute walk from the Block Museum and the Bienen School of Music, where the opening program will be held.
Block staff will be available throughout the day to assist with any questions. Additional information and driving/public transit/walking directions are available here.
About the Speakers:
Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez is a Colombo-American artist with an interdisciplinary practice based in Lincoln, NE. Her work investigates the complex intersections of migration, identity, gender, cultural memory, and the effects of colonization. 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 narratives about hybridity and cultural ownership. She has had numerous solo exhibitions at institutions including the Queens Museum of Art and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá. Her works have been collected by institutions including the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, Museo del Barrio, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Her fellowships and prizes include the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, US Latinx Artist Fellowship, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and Pollock-Krasner Visual Arts Grant. She has held residencies at SOMA, Tamarind Institute, Gasworks, and Yaddo.
Ronny Quevedo was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and lives and works in New York, NY. His practice spans installation, drawings, and prints, incorporating and subverting aspects of abstraction, painting, collage, cartography, and sports imagery. Deeply engaged with notions of identity, Quevedo reenvisions pre- and post-colonial iconographies. The recuperation of Indigenous languages of abstraction, revalorization of their associated labor, and centering of a living connection between contemporary and centuries-old cultural markers are foundational to his ongoing practice. He received his BFA in 2003 from The Cooper Union and his MFA in 2012 from Yale University.
Sandy Rodriguez is a Los Angeles-based Chicana artist and researcher. Her ongoing series Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón is comprised of a collection of maps and paintings about the intersections of history, social memory, contemporary politics, and cultural production. Her works are in permanent collections including of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Huntington Library, Art Museum & Botanical Garden, and the Denver Art Museum. She has been honored with multiple fellowships and awards, including the Kully Distinguished Fellowship in American Art from The Huntington Library, Art Museum & Botanical Garden, US Latinx Art Fellowship, and the Creative Capital Award. Rodriguez and her work have been featured this year in New York Times, The Art Newspaper, Art News, ARS Magazine, El Pais, Hyperallergic, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Tokyo Numéro, and others.
Kyle Stephan, Ph.D, is the Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Block Museum of Art and affiliated faculty in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. Her expertise encompasses twentieth and twenty-first-century art of the Americas and the history and theory of media, including photography, film, video, sound, and new media art. Notable exhibitions include Wolf Vostell: Dé-coll/age Is Your Life, the first stateside survey of the Fluxus artist at the Harvard Art Museums, and, as assistant curator, The Matter of Photography in the Americas at the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University, a survey of conceptual photography by Latin American and Latine artists. She has organized exhibitions and held curatorial roles at numerous institutions including the Harvard Art Museums, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, and the British Film Institute, where she served as curator of film and moving image art for five years.
Jesús Escobar is the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. He is a scholar of art, architecture, and urbanism in early modern Spain and its transoceanic empire. Escobar’s 2022 book, Habsburg Madrid: Architecture and the Spanish Monarchy (Penn State University Press), examines government buildings and public spaces built and shaped in the Spanish capital between 1620 and 1700 from local, regional, and global vantage points. The book complements The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Escobar’s exploration of the political and spatial evolution of Madrid from a secondary city of Castile to the seat of a global empire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Both books won the Eleanor Tufts Book Award. He is working on two new book projects on architects and architecture during the Spanish empire.
Pasados Presentes: Cultural Memory in the Americas is curated by Kyle Stephan, Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Block Museum of Art, and Jesús Escobar, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in the Humanities, Northwestern University. Lead support for the exhibition is provided by the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation. Major support is provided by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. The opening program is supported by an Academic Enrichment Grant awarded by The Alumnae of Northwestern University. Additional generous support is provided by the Myers Foundations, Illinois Arts Council, and Northwestern University’s Department of Art History.
Event venue & nearby stays
Bienen School of Music – Galvin Recital Hall, 70 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.