In Conversation: ‘Soto. Vibrations 1950 – 1960’

Please join us in for a conversation in celebration of 'Soto. Vibrations 1950 – 1960,' curated by Jean-Paul Ameline and on view at Hauser & Wirth New York 69th Street through 26 July.

This is the first exhibition to focus on the first decade of Soto’s life in Paris, during which his work transitioned from abstraction to optic and ultimately kinetic art. The conversation will be moderated by Edward J. Sullivan, with Estrellita B. Brodsky, Deborah Cullen, Gabriela Rangel, and Christian Viveros-Fauné.

Estrellita B. Brodsky****, PhD****, is a New York-based curator, collector and philanthropist, and an advocate for the art from Latin America. She has endowed curatorial positions in Latin American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, and MoMA and serves as a member of The Metropolitan Museum’s Latin American Art Initiative, MoMA’s Latin American and Caribbean Fund, and the Tate Americas Foundation board of trustees. Together with her husband Daniel Brodsky, she founded ANOTHER SPACE, a program and exhibition space in New York City dedicated to broadening international awareness and appreciation of art from Latin America.

Brodsky holds a doctorate in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and a Master's Degree from Hunter College, writing on the French Impressionist painter and impresario Gustave Caillebotte. Her doctorate dissertation research explored the achievements of a generation of artists from Argentina and Venezula who established themselves in post-World War II Paris. She co-organized the Taíno exhibition at El Museo del Barrio in 1997, and went on to curate the first U.S. retrospective of the Venezuelan kinetic artist Carlos Cruz-Diez at the Americas Society in 2008; and Jesus Soto: Paris and Beyond, 1950-1970 at Grey Art Gallery, New York University, in 2012. More recently, Brodsky curated the first U.S. museum survey of Julio Le Parc at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM): Julio Le Parc: Form into Action, (2016-2017). Brodsky has taught at Hunter College, and lectured and written extensively on Post-War Latin American art. She currently serves as a council member on the New York State Council on the Arts.

Deborah Cullen is Executive Director of The Bronx Museum of the Arts. From 2012 to 2018, she served as the Director & Chief Curator of The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in the City of New York. Previously, Cullen was Director of Curatorial Programs at El Museo del Barrio, where she worked from 1997 to 2012. She has also had a long affiliation with the late Jamaican-American master printmaker, Robert Blackburn, and his Printmaking Workshop in New York City. Cullen’s work focuses on Latinx, Caribbean, and African American modern and contemporary art, with a fondness for graphics and performance.

Gabriela Rangel is one of the leading curators of modern and contemporary Latin American art. She is artistic director at MALBA, in Buenos Aires. From 2004 to 2019, she was Director of Visual Arts and Chief Curator at Americas Society, a non-for-profit organization founded by David Rockefeller. She has curated and co-curated a number of exhibitions on modern and contemporary art, including Lydia Cabrera and Edouard Glissant: Trembling Thinking (2018-19), Americas Society-Miami Dade College); Erick Meyenberg: The wheel bears no resemblance to a leg (2017, Yerba Buena Center-Americas Society); _Hemispheres, a Labyrinth sketchbook by Silvia Grunner (_2016, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico- Americas Society); El Arte de la Amistad: Xul Solar and Jorge Luis Borges(Centro CCK, Buenos Aires, 2015-2016) Marta Minujín: Minucodes (2010-11); Arturo Herrera, Les Noces (The Wedding) 2011;Gordon Matta-Clark Undoing Spaces (Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile; Museu de Arte Moderna, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Paço Imperial Rio de Janeiro; Museo de Arte de Lima, 2009–10). She was co-editor of A Principality of Its Own: Forty Years of Visual Arts at the Americas Society (Harvard University Press, 2007) and has contributed to catalogues for numerous exhibitions, among them Abraham Cruzvillegas Empty Lot(Tate Modern, 2015); Contingent Beauty(Museum of Fine Arts Houston (2015); Arturo Herrera (Trasnocho Arte Contacto, 2009), Liliana Porter: Fotografía y ficción (Centro Cultural Recoleta, 2003), Da Adversidade Vivemos: Contemporary Latin American Conceptual Artists (Musée de Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2001), and Claudio Perna, Un artista Social (Galería de Arte Nacional de Caracas, 2004), among many others. Her articles have appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Parkett, Atlántica, and ARTnews,Art in America, El Nacional and El Universal. She was artistic director of the Simposio de Arte y Teoría del Arte Contemporáneo SITAC VIII in Mexico City (2010) and Co-Curator of the Cartagena Biennial (2014).

Edward J. Sullivan is the Helen Gould Sheppard Professor of the History of Art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts where he also serves as Deputy Director. His research, teaching and curating center on the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries of the Americas and beyond in the 19thand 20thcenturies. He is the author of over thirty books and exhibition catalogues on Latin American and Iberian art. Among his most recent publications include Making the Americas Modern: Hemispheric Art 1910-60 (2018)and The Americas Revealed: Collecting Colonial & Modern Latin American Art in the U.S. (2018, editor and essayist). Sullivan’s current project is curating and editing an accompanying book for the exhibition The Natural Art of Roberto Burle Marx, opening on June 7 2019 at the New York Botanical Garden.

Christian Viveros-Fauné is curator-at-large at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum and Kennedy Family Visiting Scholar at the USF School of Art and Art History. He was awarded Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Grant for arts writing in 2010, was named critic in residence at the Bronx Museum in 2011, and has been a lecturer at Yale University, Pratt University and Holland’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie. He is the Chief Critic for Artland and writes regularly for ArtReview, Sotheby’s/Art Agency Partner´s in other words and The Art Newspaper. Viveros-Fauné has curated numerous museum exhibitions around the world and is the author of several books. His most recent, Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art, was recently published by David Zwirner Books.