The New Social Environment#720

Juan Francisco Elso: Por América

Featuring Olga Viso, Susanna V. Temkin, José Falconi, and Monica Espinel, with Irene Vázquez

Monday, January 9, 2023

1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

Curators Olga Viso and Susanna V. Temkin join Rail contributors José Falconi and Monica Espinel for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Irene Vázquez.

In this talk

Visit Juan Francisco Elso: Por América, on view at El Museo Del Barrio through March 26, 2023 →

Olga Viso

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.

Susanna V. Temkin

Susanna V. Temkin is Curator at El Museo del Barrio, where she recently co-curated the museum’s inaugural Triennial exhibition, _La Trienal-ESTAMOS BIEN (2020-2021). Temkin earned her master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Prior to El Museo, she served as Assistant Curator at Americas Society in New York, as well as the research and archive specialist at the Cecilia de Torres, Ltd., where she assisted in co-authoring the digital catalogue raisonné of artist Joaquín Torres-García. Temkin has published essays and reviews in exhibition catalogues and magazines including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Alice Neel: People Come First; Rutgers Art Review; Burlington Magazine; among others.

José Falconi

Assistant Professor of Art and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut, José Falconi received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010. From 2001 to 2011, he was Art Forum Curator at the David Rockefeller for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, curating more than thirty shows of cutting-edge Latino and Latin American artists in an academic setting. In the United States, he has been appointed Lecturer in the Department of Art History and Architecture at Brandeis University (2014-2020), Boston University in the Spring of 2016 and in the School of the Arts at the University of Connecticut in the Spring of 2021.

In the Rail: José Falconi

Monica Espinel

Independent curator and writer Monica Espinel specializes in Modern and Contemporary Art from Latin America and is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art, Liverpool Biennial, and Wave Hill, as well as galleries, art fairs, and alternative art spaces. Most recently, she curated the International Artist-In-Residence Program at Artpace in San Antonio, TX (2020). Her writing has been featured in numerous exhibition catalogs and in ArtNexus, Arte al Dia, Flash Art, and Artforum.com.

Irene Vázquez

Irene Vázquez is a Black Mexican American poet and journalist based in Hoboken, NJ, who writes at the intersection of Black cultural work, placemaking and the environment. Irene’s debut chapbook Take Me To the Water was released by Bloof Books in October 2022. Irene works at Levine Querido, editing books about feisty twelve-year-olds, and this past spring was named a Brooklyn Poets Fellow for study in Bernard Ferguson’s workshop. In 2021, with the support of the Pulitzer Center, Irene reported on environmental justice advocacy and healing in Black and Indigenous communities on the Louisiana coast. Irene is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominated writer. When not writing, Irene likes drinking coffee, watching the WNBA, and reminding folks that the South has something to say.