After Carolee: Tender and Fierce

Group Exhibition

Exhibition: Jan 7 – Jul 18, 2021


Artpace San Antonio is pleased to announce our first exhibition of 2021: After Carolee: Tender and Fierce, guest-curated by Annette DiMeo Carlozzi. On view in the Hudson Showroom, After Carolee: Tender and Fierce was conceived for Artpace’s 25th anniversary year to give tribute to one of its most iconic former residents, Carolee Schneemann, and to welcome to Artpace for the first time more than a dozen women artists with Texas ties. In striking and dynamic ways, these artists’ works can be seen in dialog with Schneemann’s intellectual, performative, and erotic artistic legacies.

Carolee Schneemann was a pioneering artist whose long career, beginning in the 1960s and continuing until her passing in 2019, significantly influenced the trajectory of contemporary art and the possibilities for women working in the cultural realm. Renowned for performative works such as Meat Joy and Interior Scroll, Schneemann’s painterly aesthetic mobilized gestures, movements, objects, film, installation, publication, and performance in a radical exploration of the politics of female sexuality and spirit. In 1999 she participated in Artpace’s International Artist-in-Residence program, creating the multi-media installation, Vesper’s Pool, whose notions guide this show.

After Carolee: Tender and Fierce partners “Carolee’s Room,” a curatorial reflection on Vesper’s Pool and Carolee’s time at Artpace, with a multisensory exhibition of 30 works by a new generation of artists exploring the power and expansiveness of the feminine, a pursuit more urgent now than ever. The exhibition features artists who, like Carolee, work across mediums and platforms, marrying intellectual rigor with deeply empathetic explorations of personal politics and current concerns. Featured artists are Amber Bemak & Nadia Granados, Kristen Cochran, Liss LaFleur, Yuliya Lanina, Beili Liu, Paloma Mayorga, Virginia Lee Montgomery, Ayanna Jolivet Mccloud, Lovie Olivia, SAINTLORRAINE (Britt Lorraine & Kristy Perez), Megan Solis, and Julia Claire Wallace.

“This exhibition speaks to the continuing relevance of Schneemann’s most transgressive works—like Vesper’s Pool—and their apparent mirroring in much contemporary art of the moment, especially that made by women,” Carlozzi tells Artpace. “Carolee serves as inspiration—and for some, as muse—to their reimaginations of self. Three nuanced themes that were generative for Carolee’s 1999 Artpace residency foster a rich conversation with these exhibiting artists: self-portraiture and the body’s trace; transformation through empathy; and communication among the intelligences of the natural world. Cutting across disciplines, these assembled works of art—including several created especially for the exhibition—start with the body and move outwards towards new notions of the individual, family, and community.”

Because contemporary art can explore powerful issues, some of the work in this exhibition may not suitable for younger viewers. After Carolee: Tender and Fierce will be accompanied by a series of performances, interviews, and more. Details to be announced.

This exhibition has been made possible through the generous support of Sarah E. Harte and John S. Gutzler and the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation. Artpace would also like to thank the City of San Antonio Department of Arts & Culture, the John L. Santikos Charitable Foundation of the San Antonio Area Foundation, and the Texas Commission on the Arts for their ongoing support of Artpace’s exhibitions and programs.

Photo Credit: Beth Devillier

Artists

Carolee Schneemann

New Paltz, New York, USA

Carolee Schneemann was born in 1939 in Fox Chase, PA and holds a BFA from Bard College and an MFA in painting from the University of Illinois. She currently lives in New Paltz, NY and works in New York City. Her distinguished exhibition history includes a retrospective at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1997, curated by Dan Cameron, as well as solo shows at the Kunstraum, Vienna, Austria; Frauen Museum, Bonn, Germany; and the Elga Wimmer Gallery, New York, NY. Her works have been included in many group exhibitions including Anima, Animal, Animus at P.S.1., Long Island City, NY; Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949-1979 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (which traveled to Vienna, Barcelona and Tokyo); Film as Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Feminin/Masculin: le sex de l’art at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; and Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-65 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
Emerging in the early 1960s world of experimental film, music, poetry, dance and Happenings, Carolee Schneemann’s multimedia work addresses the interrelationship between postmodern issues and broader cultural concerns. Her work is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos and the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body. Using a vivid range of materials and sources, she has incorporated painting, drawing, performance, video and installation in her work. Throughout her long and influential career, Schneemann has consistently attempted to transform the definition of art, especially in regard to the body, sexuality and gender.

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Nadia Granados & Amber Bemak

Bogotá, Colombia / Dallas, Texas, USA

Nadia Granados and Amber Bemak are filmmakers and performance artists and began their collaboration in 2014. Themes of their work center around relations between Latin and North America, queer love and loss in a cross-cultural context, and the political ramifications of patriarchal, imperialist power. Their work has been seen at the Tamayo Museum, Oberhausen International Film Festival, Muestra Marrana, and OUTsider festival among other venues. Granados lives and works in Bogotá, and Bemak is based in Dallas.  

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Kristen Cochran

Dallas, Texas, USA

Kristen Cochran is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Dallas, TX. Originally from Portland, OR, she moved to Texas to complete her MFA in sculpture. She has exhibited her work widely and has been awarded residencies in Long Island City, NY, Mittersill, Austria, Banner, Wyoming and The Center for Arts and Medicine at Baylor Hospital (Dallas, TX). Kristen has taught extensively at universities and museums in the Dallas-Fort Worth area including The University of Texas, Dallas, The Nasher Sculpture Center and The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Recent exhibitions include fare well at The Nasher Sculpture Center, chroma soma at Barry Whistler Gallery (Dallas, TX), Fold In at Lawndale Arts Center (Houston, TX), GOALS at the Stein Galleries (Wright State University, Dayton, OH) and Material Intension at ex ovo projects. She will participate in the exhibition After Carolee: Tender & Fierce at Artpace, San Antonio and The NARS Foundation International Artist Residency in Brooklyn, NY in 2021.

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SAINTLORRAINE

San Antonio, Texas, USA

Saintlorraine is the collaboration of artists and life partners Kristy Perez and Britt Lorraine. The two met in 2009 and decided to merge their ideas and begin working together. Their first work we are a handful premiered in 2010 at San Antonio’s McNay Museum. Since then, the couple has created numerous performance installations, including their latest VERTEX in 2018 at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The artists are invested in pushing a cross-disciplinary approach in the “making” of their work and in this respect the work maintains a highly experimental tone, resulting in its own unique aesthetic.

Kristy Perez (b. 1971, San Antonio, Texas) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work ranges from drawing, poetry, video, abstract painting and design to site-specific sculptural installations. She worked for six years in the field of art conservation prior to pursuing her visual-arts practice full time in 2007. She received a nomination for the 2011 Arthouse Texas Prize and is a two-time recipient of the Artist Foundation of San Antonio grant, including the 2010 Chuck Ramirez Award for Visual Art. Her work has garnered solo exhibitions including All That Stands Between Us (2009), at Sala Diaz Gallery, The Giving Distance (2017) at The Southwest School of Art and group shows including Urban Jalousie, the inaugural roaming biennial of Tehran in Istanbul, Turkey; and Bruit Rose at the Maison Populaire, a contemporary art center in Paris.

Britt Lorraine (b. 1978, Fort Worth, Texas) earned her B.F.A. at Southern Methodist University (Dallas) and her M.F.A. at the University of Iowa (Iowa City), and has studied on full scholarship at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance (New York City, New York). She is a 2012 Artist Foundation of San Antonio grant recipient for her reconstruction of the Ballet Russe’s Rite of Spring. RITE , an eight-plus-hour nonstop solo dance performance won the 2012 ‘Best of Contemporary Art Month’ award in San Antonio. Her most recent work PANOPTICON premiered at Sala Diaz Gallery in 2018.

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Liss LaFleur

DFW, Texas, USA

Liss LaFleur (b. TX, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans moving image, installation, performance, and glass. Often described as surreal, intimate, and poetic, her projects explore the interplay between feminist discourse, queer subjectivity, the protesting body, and technology. She is a 2020-21 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow.

In 2018, LaFleur was awarded an Immersive Scholar grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to research the urgency of the #MeToo movement and translate public data into a series of immersive videos using 3D animation and conceptual art strategies. In 2019, all of the data associated with this research was archived in the #MeToo Digital Media Collection at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

LaFleur’s work has been exhibited and screened internationally by museums, galleries and other cultural institutions including the TATE Modern, UK; Cannes Court Métrage, FR; Hearst Museum; the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; PBS/ POV Digital; the Reykjavik Art Museum, IS; South by Southwest; Artespacio Galeria de Arte, Santiago, Chile; the Museum of Glass, US; Sister Gallery, AU; and the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, South Korea. She was nominated for a Webby Award (2019), and has been a finalist for the Foundwork Art Prize (2019), Art Prize (2017), the Aesthetica Art Prize (2018), the Lumen Prize (2016), and the Edie Windsor Coding Fellowship (2019). She is a recipient of the College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship (2014), and a pupil of documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark.

LaFleur graduated with an MFA in Media Art as an Artist Fellow from Emerson College in Boston, MA, where she also founded the New England Graduate Media Symposium. From 2012 – 2013 she was a media researcher on the Ford Foundation Advancing LGBT Rights Initiative, “Out for Change: Transmedia Organizing Network” at the MIT Media Lab. She is an Assistant Professor and Program Director in the College of Visual Art & Design at the University of North Texas, and she is represented by Galleri Urbane Marfa + Dallas.

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Yuliya Lanina

Austin, Texas, USA

Yuliya Lanina is an interdisciplinary artist whose work exists at the intersection of visual art, performance, and technological innovation. She creates alternate realities in her works—ones based on trauma, sexuality, loss, and identity. A secular Jew of Ukrainian descent who was born and raised in Moscow, Lanina arrived in New York in 1990 as a political refugee. There, she established herself as a pioneering artist on the cutting edge by combining digital technologies with handmade media.

Lanina has exhibited and performed extensively both nationally and internationally, including SXSW Interactive, Texas; Seoul Art Museum, Korea; SIGGRAPH Asia, Japan; 798 Beijing Biennial, China; Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio; Patrick Heide Gallery, London, UK; Teatro Santa Ana, Mexico; Blanton Museum of Art, Texas; and Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia. Her recent solo show at Xposed gallery on New York’s High Line was viewed by more than 1,000 people per day over three weeks. The screening venues for her animations and films include Museum of Contemporary Art, Florida; Austrian Film Museum, Vienna, Austria; El Museo Cultural, New Mexico; Museum Ludwig, Germany; Project Arts Centre, Lithuania; and Le Carreau du Temple, Paris, France.

Lanina’s professional honors include fellowships and scholarships from Fulbright, Vienna, Austria; Headlands Art Center, California; Yaddo, New York; Artpace San Antonio, Texas; Marble House Project, New York; The Puffin Foundation, New Jersey; and CORE Cultural Funding Program, Texas. Recent speaking engagements include United Nations Human Rights Office, The University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria; GIFF, Mexico; and SXSW Interactive.

Lanina’s work has been featured in Brooklyn Rail, Houston Press, Glasstire, Art Review, Bloomberg News, Australian Art Review, SightLines, and Beijing Today. Yuliya was listed among the “top 10 artists in NYC now” by Revolt Magazine and received an honorable citation from the New York State Assembly in 2013.

Lanina’s collaborative projects, for which she created visuals to be displayed alongside performances by dancers or musicians, have been presented at the New Museum Festival, New York; San Diego Museum of Art, California; National Museum the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, Lithuania; National Sawdust, New York; and recently at Kronos Quartet’s virtual festival.

Lanina holds an MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from SUNY Purchase College. She is currently Assistant Professor of Practice at the Department of Arts and Entertainment Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Beili Liu

Austin, Texas, USA

Beili Liu is a visual artist who has exhibited extensively in Asia, Europe and across the United States. She has held solo exhibitions at venues such as Hå Gamle Prestegard, Norwegian National Art and Culture Center (2016, 2011), Hua Gallery, London, UK (2012), Galerie An Der Pinakothek Der Moderne, Munich, Germany (2017, 2011), Elisabeth de Brabant Art Center, Shanghai (2009), the Chinese Culture Foundation, San Francisco (2015, 2008), and the Crow Museum of Asian Art, Dallas TX. Liu’s work has been showcased in group exhibitions and performances at the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., Detroit Institute of Arts, Asia Society Texas Center, Hangzhou Fiber Art Triennial, Zhijing Art Museum, China, Museum of Southeast Texas, Hamburg Art Week, Germany, 2011 Kaunas Biennale, Lithuania, among many others.

Beili Liu is a 2016 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant recipient. Liu has been designated the 2018 Texas State Artist in 3D medium by the Texas State Legislature and the Texas Commission on The Arts. Beili Liu’s work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts (Museum of Southeast Texas, 2014) and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artistic Innovation and Collaboration Grant (Women and Their Work Gallery, 2013). Liu has been awarded artist residency fellowships from the Joan Mitchell Center, Studios at MASS MoCA, Facebook AIR, Fiskars AIR, Djerassi Foundation, and Fundación Valparaíso, Spain, among others.

Liu’s work has received critical reviews from publication including Art in America, Sacchi Review, UK, Helsinki Sanomat News, Finland, Morgenbladet, Norway, China Daily, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Hamburg Abendblatt, Germany, Vita (Life) Magazine, Italy, ArtSlant, The Huffington Post, New York Times, San Francisco Examiner and LA Confidential.

Born in Jilin, China, Beili Liu now lives and works in Austin, Texas. Liu received her MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is the Leslie Waggner Professor in the Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Paloma Mayorga

Austin, Texas, USA

Paloma Mayorga is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator based in Austin, Texas. She earned a B.A. in Painting from the Sarofim School of Fine Arts at Southwestern University in 2010 and has gone on to receive the Emerging Artist Award from the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center in 2015, Best Visual Artist by the Austin Chronicle 2017 Reader’s Poll, and Southwestern University’s 18 Under 40 Award for 2020. Most recently, she participated in The Contemporary Austin’s 2019 Crit Group, and is currently exhibiting work virtually on artsy.net through grayDUCK Gallery.

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Virginia Lee Montgomery

Austin, Texas, USA

Virginia Lee Montgomery (VLM) (b. Houston, TX, USA) is a video artist, sculptor, and facilitator. She received her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and her MFA from Yale University in Sculpture in 2016. Working across video, performance, sound, and sculpture, her artwork is a research practice of feminist metaphysics. The work is surreal, latently autobiographical, and paradoxical in form; it is cryptic and literal, conceptual and hand-built, digital and physical. While the artwork shifts in subject matter from ponytails to particle accelerators, to syrups, stones, moths and machines—VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures like drilling, dousing, or reaching and recursive symbols like circles, holes and spheres. Her diverse artistic movements interrogate the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures. As a working woman artist, VLM leads a surreal double-life; VLM also works as a professional business scribe, a Graphic Facilitator, a job for which she travels the country to diagram the development of strategic ideas at private brainstorming meetings and public conferences for clients. In her work as an artist, VLM turns this skill, which she describes as “mind map scribing,” inwards, rendering the contours of her own subconscious and the logic of her dreams and memories. Collectively, VLM’s symbols, forms, and gestures rupture material surfaces, opening up portals to unknown psychic ends…

She has had solo exhibitions with New Museum (NY), Times Square Arts (NY), Museum Folkwang (Germany), Wright Lab at Yale University (CT), The Lawndale Art Center (TX), Hesse Flatow (NY), Plymouth Rock (Switzerland), Meyohas (NY), and False Flag (NY). She has exhibited internationally at institutions including Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), SculptureCenter (NY), La Panacée-MoCo (France), The Hessel Museum at Bard College (NY), The Banff Centre (Canada), Socrates Sculpture Park (NY), and The Menil Collection (TX), among others.

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Ayanna Jolivet Mccloud

Houston, Texas, USA

Ayanna Jolivet Mccloud makes art about landscapes, mapping, and sensation. Her interdisciplinary art is minimal in form and centers on restraint, and there are often layers of meaning beyond the surface. Much of her work is inspired by poetics and rituals of African Americans and more broadly the African diaspora. She has participated in exhibitions and residencies throughout the Americas in the US, Caribbean, and Latin America, and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ayanna is director of education and public programs at the Houston Botanic Garden, creating the organization’s first-ever public programs which will link plants and nature to people and culture. A fourth-generation artist, she enjoys collecting maps and is a proud mother to Zahir, which means radiance and light.

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Lovie Olivia

Houston, Texas, USA

American Artist, Lovie Olivia — born, living and working in Houston Texas creates works that involve Gender, Race and Sexuality and the historical and cultural nuances surrounding these intersections.  She employs painting, printmaking, sculpture and installation to arrive at her. Throughout her career she has chosen an intentional autodidactic approach to a rigorous multi-disciplined practice challenging and commenting on the canonized narrative of Art History.  Olivia’s work hangs in numerous private and public collections including Project Row Houses, ACRE Residency Chicago and the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institute. She is a recipient of three Individual Artist Awards, which are funded by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance. She has exhibited at  Corridor Gallery, Brooklyn NY, 1969 Gallery Manhattan NY, Jam Gallery Brooklyn NY, Woman Made Gallery, Chicago IL, Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), Houston Museum of African American Culture (HMAAC), Houston TX, The Station Museum, Project Row Houses, Houston TX, TSU University Museum, Houston TX, Arthello Beck Gallery in Dallas TX, “Thrice Removed” in 2010 was her first solo opportunity at SPACETAKER ARC (FreshArts) in Houston followed by MATERIA-LIES (PRH), DAMASK (ALH), TUFT and FACET, (LAC).

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Megan Solis

San Antonio, Texas, USA

Megan Solis’ (b. 1990, San Antonio, TX) work splinters and bleeds into drawing, sculpture, video and performance. Recently obtaining her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Solis strives for a forceful intimacy with her audiences questioning the communal pursuit of happiness. Solis has authored and birthed her own heroine, Glory West, a love-sick blonde Texan, who navigates themes of desperation and loneliness creating concerts of unrequited lust, precarious displays of confidence and self-conscious portraits of love for her fans. Glory West’s odyssey encapsulates a monstrous feminine mystique, holding tightly to both self-inflicted hysteria and hapless horror. Solis has participated in the Hello Studio Residency in San Antonio, TX and the Arteles Artist Residency in Haukijärvi, Finland. She has exhibited her work at the Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin, TX, The Invisible Gallery in Houston, TX, the McNay Art Museum and Revenant Gallery in San Antonio, TX, the CICA Museum in South Korea, and the Freedman Gallery in Pennsylvania. Most recently she was invited to perform at Sweet Pass Sculpture Park in Dallas, TX and is an awardee of Red Bull’s Microgrant program 2020 cycle.

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Julia Claire Wallace

Houston, Texas, USA
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Curator

Annette DiMeo Carlozzi

Austin, TX

Independent curator Annette DiMeo Carlozzi has built an expansive practice across the US as a curator of modern and contemporary art, focusing on ideas and experiences, artists and audiences. Raised in Boston and trained at the Walker Art Center, she has served in a variety of foundational roles: as the first curator at Laguna Gloria Art Museum (now The Contemporary Austin); executive director of the Aspen Art Museum and the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; Visual Arts Producer for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta; and in multiple positions—ranging from founding modern and contemporary curator to Deputy Director for Art and Programs to Curator at Large—at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin. Committed to expanding the canon, she has created notable exhibitions (Luis Jiménez, Paul Chan, Michael Smith, Deborah Hay, Negotiating Small TruthsAmerica/AmericasDesire), produced important commissions (Nancy Holt, Siah Armajani, Betye Saar, Vito Acconci, Byron Kim, Teresita Fernández), and acquired major works by a wide range of international artists. Carlozzi has had a long relationship with Artpace, having served as an early advisor, artist interviewer, and program panelist, member of the 1998 artist selection panel and 2001–03 Board of Visitors. In 2015 she curated Immersed from Linda Pace’s art collection, now called Ruby City.

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