(CANCELLED) Curated Conversation: Carmen Herrera’s Quiet Revolution
Event Details
Due to speaker availability challenges, we unfortunately had to cancel this event. We will be rescheduling it to a later date and will add to our events calendar when confirmed.
Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera created a landmark mural for the Blanton’s façade, her first and only mural painting for a major institution, when she was 104 years old. Join us for a conversation about her 85 years of artistic experimentation by those who knew her best: artist Tony Bechara, her life-long friend, and Dana Miller, the curator of her groundbreaking Whitney Museum of Art retrospective.
Moderated by Blanton Curator Vanessa Davidson, this conversation will explore Herrera’s quiet revolution: the experimental artistic practice she developed without due recognition until she was in her 80s. It will touch upon Herrera the artist, the visionary, the pioneer, and the radical woman.
Learn more about Carmen Herrera’s mural on the project page for our Blanton New Grounds Initiative.
Funding for this program is provided by the Barbara Duncan Centennial Endowed Lectureship.
ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS
Tony Bechara was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He received a BA from Georgetown University in Washington D.C. He did post graduate studies at New York University’s School of International Relations, the Sorbonne in Paris, and the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
As a painter and printmaker, he has participated in many group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial, MOCA, Los Angeles, Bard College, PS 1 MoMa and at other museums. He has had many one-person shows at galleries in New York City, Washington, DC, San Juan, Miami, Lima, and Munich. His work has been the subject of major solo exhibits at the Alternative Museum NYC, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, and at El Museo del Barrio in NYC. His paintings and prints are in many collections in the US, Europe, and Latin America. He has been recipient
of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
He has been an active Board member for several organizations. He is currently chairman emeritus of El Museo del Barrio, where he served as Chair for 12 years. He has been a trustee of Studio in a School for more than 20 years and has served on the BAM Board for 20 years. (Brooklyn Academy of Music). He was a member of the NYC Latino Art Commission during the whole Bloomberg administration.
Photo: Maku Lopez
Dana Miller is an art historian and independent curator based in Seattle. Previously she was the DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, where she worked for two decades. Among her many projects there were major exhibitions and catalogues devoted to Jay DeFeo, Buckminster Fuller, and Carmen Herrera. Miller curated numerous collection installations at the Whitney, including co-curating America is Hard to See, which inaugurated the Whitney’s downtown building in 2015. She also edited the accompanying 432-page publication, Handbook of the Collection. She has written and lectured on artists ranging from Ruth Asawa and Felix Gonzalez-Torres to Isamu Noguchi and Claes Oldenburg. Miller graduated Magna Cum Laude from Duke University and received her master’s from Columbia University, where she studied for her Ph.D. in Art
History.
Photo: Scott Rudd
Feature Image Credit: Detail of Carmen Herrera mural commissioned by the Blanton and made possible with generous funding provided by the Kahng Foundation, near the entrance of the Mari and James A. Michener Gallery Building.