Body/Magic: Liz Cohen and friends

Photographer and performance artist Liz Cohen focuses on the intersections of immigration, industry, labor and women’s representation in popular media. Cohen is best known for her BODYWORK project, in which she simultaneously transformed an East German Trabant into an American El Camino lowrider while inhabiting a new identity herself as a car customizer and bikini model. Through this immersive series, Cohen produced a body of work that challenges American cultural norms as they pertain to the eroticization of the automobile industry as well as the challenging role of women’s bodies in that space. In 2020, Cohen received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the subject of a solo exhibition at the Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, “Body/Magic: Liz Cohen,” through May 29, 2021.

Curatorial Assistant in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dhyandra Lawson completed her Master of Arts in Art History through the LACMA-ASU Master’s Fellowship in Art History. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Art and Art History from Occidental College. Recently, she co-curated Eleanor Antin: Time’s Arrow (2019) and Richard Prince: Untitled (cowboy) (2018). Her research includes contemporary art and photography, as well as contemporary African Diasporic artistic production. Currently, she is preparing the exhibition The Past in Front of Us: Imagining Black Diasporas in the 21st Century, a global consideration of two decades of artistic innovation by Black artists from LACMA’s collection.

Artist, educator, writer, and Senior Curator at the Arizona State University Art Museum, Julio César Morales’ work includes solo exhibitions with Superflex, Suzanne Lacy, Nina Beier, Ivan Argote, Claudia Peña Salinas, Yoshua Okon, Liz Cohen, Koki Tanaka, Jennie C. Jones, Miguel Angel Rios, Pablo Helguera, and many others. His artwork explores labor, migration, and underground economies, and has been shown at the Lyon Biennale, the Istanbul Biennale, the Singapore Biennale, and Prospect 3, among others. The recipient of a 2020 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, his art is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Kadist Foundation, and others.

Curator, writer, and contemporary art historian Olga Viso is based at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and the Phoenix Art Museum. Viso was previously the Executive Director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Director/Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. She is a scholar of contemporary and Latin American Art, with a focus on the contemporary art of Cuba. She has organized numerous solo and group exhibitions, including monographic surveys of artists Jim Hodges, Guillermo Kuitca, Ana Mendieta, and Juan Muñoz. Her most recent exhibition Juan Francisco Elso: Por América that recently opened at New York’s El Museo del Barrio, will travel next to the Phoenix Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami.