Credit Line: Laura Anderson Barbata, Performance for San Pedro Festivities, 2011, Zaachila, Oaxaca. Photo: Marco Pacheco / Image courtesy of the artist.
This fall, the Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series Galleries in the Mabel Smith Douglass Library will welcome the 2016-17 Estelle Lebowitz Endowed Visiting Artist Exhibition, Laura Anderson Barbata: Collaborations Beyond Borders. The exhibit contains selected highlights of textile, sculptural, 2-dimensional, and video works from the traveling exhibition Transcommunality.
Save the Dates:
Tuesday, November 1st, 5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m
Join us for a reception in honor of the artist at 5 p.m. and a free public artist lecture on in the Mabel Smith Douglass Room at Douglass Library.
Wednesday, November 2nd, 10:30 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Barbata will present La Extraordinaria Historia de Julia Pastrana, a performance work in progress at Alexander Library in the Scholarly Communications Center.
Background:
Born in Mexico City and based in New York, Laura Anderson Barbata’s work focuses on participatory art initiatives that document communities and traditions, using storied art forms as platforms for social change, contemporary performance, group participation, and protest. Her collaborative and ongoing transdisciplinary works have been initiated in places such as the Amazon of Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, Norway, the United States., and Mexico. Her practice intertwines traditional and contemporary mediums, so-called “fine art” and popular art, and craft and folk customs forging links between the past and the present, as well as the individual and the community.
Among her most well-known projects are: Transcommunality, a decade-long project with communities in Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, and Brooklyn highlighting the moko jumbie stilt walking tradition; Intervention: Wall Street, a collaborative performance with the Brooklyn Jumbies that took place during 2011’s Occupy Wall Street protests; and The Repatriation of Julia Pastrana, a project involving the return of Ms. Pastrana (a woman who was exhibited in the 19th century as the ugliest woman in the world) for burial in her homeland of Mexico.
Barbata’s work is included in numerous private and public collections, among them, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; and Landesbank Baden-Wϋrttemberg, Stuttgart, Germany. She is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte, FONCA-CONACULTA, México; and the Julia Pastrana project is supported by the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte, FONCA-CONACULTA, México.
