Visualizing Racial Complexity brings together art critic and independent curator Tatiana Flores and Juana Valdés, one of the featured artists in the digital exhibition, The Abyss of the Ocean: Cuban Women Photographers, Migrations, and the Question of Race. During an engaging dialogue informed by archipelagic thought and feminist practices, Flores and Valdés will share on their recent projects and exhibitions and discuss issues of race and Latinidad within the categories Cuban, Latin American, and Latinx Art. The conversation will be moderated by Aldeide Delgado, Guest Curator of The Abyss of the Ocean. CCCADI Curator-at-Large Grace Aneiza Ali will offer Introductions and CCCADI Curatorial Fellow Dalaeja Foreman will serve as the Respondent.
Dr. Tatiana Flores is a Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies with a joint appointment in the Department of Art History. A specialist in modern and contemporary Latin American art, she is the author of Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30! (Yale University Press, 2013). A 2017-18 Getty Scholar, Flores received the 2016 Arts Writers book prize from the Andy Warhol Foundation and was the 2007-2008 Cisneros Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She is President of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP), past chair of the editorial board of Art Journal, and also serves on the boards of ASAP/Journal and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. Professor Flores curated the critically acclaimed exhibition Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago for the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach, CA.
Juana Valdés is a multi-disciplinary artist and professor. She came to the United States at the age of eight in 1971. Valdes completed her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in 1993 and her BFA in Sculpture at Parsons School of Design in 1991. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 1995. Recent solo exhibitions include: Rest Ashore, Locust Projects, Miami, FL (2020); Terrestrial Bodies, Cuban Legacy Gallery, Miami Dade College Special Collections, Freedom Tower (2019-2020); An Inherent View of the World, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL (2017); and From Island to Ocean: Caribbean and Pacific Dialogues, Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University, NJ (2015). Her exhibition An Inherent View of the World was acquired in full by the Pérez Art Museum, Miami.
Aldeide Delgado, a Cuban-born, Miami-based independent Latinx art historian and curator, is the founder & director of Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA). Delgado studies, publishes on, and curates from feminist and decolonial perspectives on crucial topics of the history of photography and abstraction within Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx contexts. Delgado is the Guest Curator of CCCADI’s digital exhibition The Abyss of the Ocean: Cuban Women Photographers, Migrations, and the Question of Race.
Dalaeja Foreman, CCCADI Curatorial Fellow, is a community organizer, curator, cultural worker and first-generation Caribbean-Brooklynite. As a hood-intellectual, their work focuses on political education, Black and Indigenous Autonomy, and community control through community preservation. Radical pedagogy, reclaiming public space, and liberatory action are central to Foreman’s curatorial and organizing practices. Specifically, she works towards the goal of prototyping counter-hegemonic ideologies and actions, combating internalized misconceptions oppressed people have of ourselves and emphasizing resistance through direct action and cultural production. Foreman is one of three founders of the woodworking cooperative, breadfruit.