A Panel with Karen Grimson, Megan Kincaid,
Juan Gabriel Ramírez Bolívar, and Delia Solomons
Moderated by Edward J. Sullivan
Presented in collaboration with The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU
Tuesday, November 30
6 PM EST
This program was conducted in English and presented live on Zoom. An edited recording will be added in the coming months.
During their lifetimes, Argentine artists Sarah Grilo (1919–2007) and José Antonio Fernández-Muro (1920–2014) made significant contributions to global abstraction. Forming part of a generation of artists working in Buenos Aires following the emergence of concrete art in the 1940s, this married couple offered distinct stylistic contributions that helped expand the genre. Their work was shown internationally, and they served as emissaries of the Argentine avant-garde at notable exhibitions and biennials. At the height of their prominence in Argentina, Grilo and Fernández-Muro relocated to New York in 1962, where they continued to push abstraction beyond its previous boundaries.
This panel will present new scholarship on the activity of Grilo and Fernández-Muro in New York, considering both their individual artistic developments and their role in relation to Latin American art’s reception in the United States during the 1960s. Grappling with existing interpretations of their careers that celebrate their time in New York as a breakthrough moment, this panel will examine their achievements through alternate methodological and historical approaches that displace the center-periphery narrative, while also considering questions of race, nationality, and gender.
In her presentation, Megan Kincaid will introduce her research for the exhibition José Antonio Fernández-Muro: Geometry in Transfer at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), locating the New York years within Grilo’s and Fernández-Muro’s sweeping careers. Delia Solomons will then contextualize how their work circulated within the surge of survey exhibitions dedicated to Latin American art in the United States amid inter-American Cold War frictions between 1959 and 1968. In his lecture, Juan Gabriel Ramírez Bolívar will trace the evolution of the circle as a geometric and figurative device across Fernández-Muro’s New York paintings. Karen Grimson will then present on Grilo’s work from 1962 to 1970, explicating how her use of language, initiated during her New York residency, functioned as a proclamation of discursive agency. The presentations will be followed by a discussion moderated by Edward J. Sullivan.
The program is organized in conjunction with José Antonio Fernández-Muro: Geometry in Transfer, curated by Megan Kincaid, at ISLAA.
More info here.