events

Macarena Gómez-Barris

Macarena Gómez-Barris is Chairperson of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies and Director and Founder of the Global South Center at Pratt Institute. She is author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives that theorizes social life through five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). Macarena is author of the recently published Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (August 2018), a text of critical hope about the role of submerged art and activisms in troubled times. She is also author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010). Macarena has written numerous articles and essays in art catalogues as well as peer reviewed journals, including writing on the work of Julie Mehretu, Laura Aguilar, Carolina Caycedo, Regina José Galindo, Cecilia Vicuña, Francisco Huichaqueo, and Patricio Guzmán.

Stamatina Gregory

Stamatina Gregory is a curator and an art historian, whose work focuses primarily on the interrelationship of contemporary art and politics. She has organized exhibitions for institutions including The Cooper Union, FLAG Art Foundation, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Gregory was the curator of New York photographer and activist Brian Weil’s retrospective at the ICA, Philadelphia, and she was the Deputy Curator of the inaugural pavilion of The Bahamas at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013). With Jeanne Vaccaro she has organized the exhibitions Bring Your Own Body: transgender between archives and aesthetics, Reading Room: the feminist art of self-help, Tuesday Smilie: the Right Brain of Darkness, and CURRICULUM: spaces of learning and unlearning. Gregory has taught art history, critical theory, and writing at New York University, The New School, the School of Visual Arts, Purchase College, Sotheby’s Institute, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Jeanne Vaccaro

Jeanne Vaccaro is a writer, curator, and teacher whose work explores the intersection of aesthetics and the history and theory of trans and queer life. Her book in process, Handmade: Feelings and Textures of Transgender, considers the felt labor of making identity and was awarded the Arts Writers Grant by Creative Capital | the Andy Warhol Foundation. Jeanne is a Queer|Art curatorial fellow, and with Stamatina Gregory has organized the exhibitions Bring Your Own Body: transgender between archives and aesthetics, Reading Room: the feminist art of self-help, Tuesday Smilie: the Right Brain of Darkness, and CURRICULUM: spaces of learning and unlearning. With Joan Lubin she is co-curating Adjuvant, an exhibition on AIDS architectures, for the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in 2021. Jeanne is the co-founder of the NYC Trans Oral History Project, a community partnership with the New York Public Library. She received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University.

Sarah Zapata

Sarah Zapata (b. 1988, Corpus Christi, TX, USA) makes work with labor-intensive processes such as handweaving, rope coiling, latch hooking, and sewing by intersecting theories of gender and ethnicity with pre-colonial histories and techniques. Making work with meditative, mechanical means, her current work deals with the multiple facets of her complex identity: a Texan living in Brooklyn, a lesbian raised as an evangelical Christian, a first generation American of Latin American descent, a contemporary artist inspired by ancient civilizations, an artist challenging the history of craft as “women’s work” within the realm of art. Zapata’s work has been exhibited at the New Museum (NY), El Museo del Barrio (NY), Museum of Art and Design (NY), Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (NY), Boston University (MA), LAXART (CA), Deli Gallery (NY), Arsenal Contemporary (NY), and Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center (NY). Zapata has also completed recent residencies at MASS MoCA (MA), A-Z West (CA), and Wave Hill (NY), and is the recent recipient of an NFA Project Grant from the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures. Zapata was an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2016.