CONVERSATION Radical Texts A conversation with curators Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Ruth Estévez, moderated by Catherine Wagley Sunday, May 6 at 12pm The Den at Acid-Free
This conversation between Fajardo-Hill and Estévez takes as a point of departure their two recent Pacific Standard Time exhibitions, Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985at the Hammer Museum and The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of Warat REDCAT. Both exhibitions are traveling to institutions beyond Los Angeles—Radical Womento the Brooklyn Museum and the Pinacoteca, São Paulo, and The Words of Othersto the Perez Art Museum (Miami), the Reina Sofia (Madrid) and the Jumex Collection (Mexico City), among other institutions. X Artists' Books published The Words of Others, the first full English translation of Ferrari’s literary collage Palabras ajenas, in 2017. Catherine Wagley will moderate a conversation about the importance of books to each exhibition as both an archive and a correction to the art historical record.
Ruth Estévez is an independent curator and set designer based in Los Angeles and Mexico City. From 2012 to 2018 she was the gallery director and curator of REDCAT, where she has worked with artists including Javier Téllez, Quinn Latimer, and Allora & Calzadilla, and curated the group exhibitions Agency (Assembly: Before and After the Split Second Recorded), Hotel Theory(co-curated with Sohrab Mohebbi), and Chalk Circles. Her exhibition for the Getty's Pacific Standard Time LA/LA was The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War, which opened in September 2017, and was also a live performance of Ferrari's seminal text. From 2007 to 2011, Estévez served as chief curator at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City. In 2010 she cofounded LIGA Space for Architecture Mexico City.
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill is an independent British/Venezuelan art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art, specializing in Latin American art. She has a PhD in art history from the University of Essex, England, and an MA in 20th-century art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, England. Fajardo-Hill co-curated, with Andrea Giunta, the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, a survey of radical artistic practices by women artists in Latin America, which opened in 2017 at the Hammer Museum under the Getty’s initiative Pacific Standard Time LA/LA. Fajardo-Hill is also working on the Sayago & Pardon initiative Abstraction in Action, a multiplatform project on contemporary abstraction in Latin America, which will encompass a series of exhibitions. She was guest curator at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles, for the exhibition Ricardo Valverde: Experimental Sights, 1971–1996 in May 2014, and the general curator of the 19 Bienal de Arte Paiz in Guatemala in June 2014.
Catherine Wagley is an art writer and critic based in Los Angeles.
