Film & Video (Film & Video)

As an artist Francisco Camacho Herrera seeks ways in which his work can exist within, and challenge, official social channels. His practice revolves around the possibility of art to bear practical effects on cultural assumptions and reflects on redefining common concepts that can lead art to change the ways in which we conceive society. Camacho Herrera speculated that Chinese sailors might have reached the Americas by crossing the Pacific Ocean before the arrival of the Spanish in the late 15th century.

Painting (Painting)

Francisco Herrero Peñuela uses old forms to make his elaborate, richly textured surfaces. Practicing a form of marquetry common in 15th century Italy—intarsia—Peñuela pieces together fragments of wood to create abstract images in warm tones of gold, brown, and black. While original Italian intarsia would have been representational, embedding landscapes, objects, and narrative scenes directly into walls, Peñuela’s compositions hedge away from direct representation, with shapes and pattern emerging organically out of his carefully arranged wooden pieces.

Installation (Installation)

You have given the world your songs by Francisca Benítez is a poem in American Sign Language (ASL). It employs ten handshapes arranged in a numbering sequence from 1 to 10. This visual rhyme sequence is standard in Deaf poetry, as is the Tenth in Latin American popular oral/written poetry traditions.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Drought Mask by Rajni Perera is a prototype that is suggestive of dire implications for human survival. Directly addressing the urgent climate crisis, specifically wide-spread drought, this sculpture imagines hybrid cultural aesthetics of the near-future after global collapse. Composed of various woven textiles complete with frills and fringes, leather, a gas mask, and pencil, Rajni’s mask prefigures future dystopian characters who are resilient and resourceful; self-fashioning tools for survival.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This series of small drawings is executed with varying materials—pen, ink, colored pencil, charcoal, and masking tape—on architect’s tracing paper. Alÿs often executes such sketches in preparation for his performances, videos, and larger two-dimensional bodies of work. As the first visual representations of his ideas, they capture his thinking processes at the raw conceptual stage and allow us to gain a deeper understanding of his larger works.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Nightwatch , which is an ironic reference to the celebrated painting by Rembrandt, follows the course of a fox wandering among the celebrated collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London. The path of the fox, from galleries containing 16th, 17th and 18th century portraits of historic figures from British history hung on plush walls, is circuitous and seemingly random. The fox tracks back and forth, sometimes inspecting the gallery furniture, often walking through the middle of the room but sometimes around its perimeter until eventually it climbs on top of a showcase, covered in fabric where he settles down to sleep.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Boat with Legs

Painting (Painting)

Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape. Rooted in Central American folklore, politics, and culture, his works often move beyond the canvas onto the wall or into the streets. In Á rbol y Pelicao (Tree and Pelican, 2009), a tree with cartoonlike creatures drawn in pen beside it emerges from a field of bright swaths of color.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Las Bambas by Elena Tejada-Herrera takes the name of a copper mine in the Andean department of Apurímac, Peru. The operations of this mining project were resisted by the local peasant communities, whose protests forced it to paralyze its operations. As of 2023, this is the most serious unresolved social conflict in the country.

Pink Man Walking on Boats with Woman Following