Magali Lara (Mexican, b. 1956) is an artist and writer whose evocative work across painting, drawing, and other media often probes feminist, personal, and biographical subjects. Her early work in painting referenced the organic forms of the natural world, while her collages represented introspective themes and events. Inspired by a life-long commitment to writing, Lara has also incorporated text into her visual art throughout her career. In the 1970s, Lara was a member of the collective Grupo Março, which emerged in Mexico as part of the grupos movement of the ’70s and ’80s. Responding to the underrepresentation of women’s issues within the grupos, she collaborated with other artists to form discussion groups and develop projects that addressed feminist concerns, including the environment Mi casa es mi cuerpo (My House Is My Body, 1983), created with Mónica Mayer and Rowena Morales, and artists’ books, produced with Carmen Boullosa, that visualized subjective female experience. Lara’s solo work from this period included introspective watercolors and collages that attended to questions of sexuality and the body, for example, with Valores sociales, personales, etc… (Social, Personal Values, etc…) and De lo amoroso, personal, confidencial, etcétera (From the Loving, the Personal, the Confidential, Et Cetera). In recent decades, Lara has expanded her practice to encompass other media, turning her attention to animated, musical, and theatrical projects. Recent exhibitions of her work include Toda historia de amor es una historia de fantasmas (2021) at Seminario de Cultura Mexicana, Mexico City; Magali Lara: Intemperie (2015) at the Museo Nacional de la Estampa, Mexico City; and Magali Lara: Glaciares (2010) at the Visual Arts Center, Austin, TX.
Thursday, February 2, 2023
5:00 PM EST
Register
Please join us for a live online conversation between artist Magali Lara and curator Cecilia Fajardo-Hill on Lara’s multimedia work and her career-spanning interest in the limits and possibilities of diagrams, plans, and maps.
Magali Lara (Mexican, b. 1957) has mined the subjects of personal experience, identity, and desire in her text-based practice, which has ranged from performance and installation to collage and artists’ books. In her introspective drawings and watercolors Individualidad Medio Ambiente—Interior/Exterior (1978), Valores sociales, personales, etc. (1978), and De lo amoroso, personal, confidencial, etcétera (1982), she established relationships between the mind, the body, and the environment in methodical charts, reminiscent of mental maps, that structure the shifting contours of biography. Such works take up the form and function of cartography—with its goal of ordering the world around us—in order to push beyond it, deflecting it inward to the subjective properties of the self.
This event is organized in conjunction with the exhibition Political/Subjective Maps: Anna Bella Geiger, Magali Lara, Lea Lublin, and Margarita Paksa at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). The conversation will take place in English and will be hosted on Zoom, and a recording will be made available online after the event.
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill is an independent British Venezuelan art historian, curator, and writer whose work focuses on modern and contemporary Latin American and Latinx art. She has a PhD in art history from the University of Essex and an MA and a postgraduate diploma in twentieth-century art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Fajardo-Hill has curated numerous exhibitions and published extensively on contemporary Latin American and international artists. She cocurated the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 (2017) at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and is the editor of Remains–Tomorrow: Themes in Contemporary Latin American Abstraction (Hatje Cantz, 2022), a book on post-1990s abstraction in Latin America. She received the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2020, is the 2021–22 visiting scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University, and is a 2022–23 associate of DRCLAS. In addition, Fajardo-Hill is a visiting scholar of museum studies; the director of Northlight Gallery at the ASU Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts; and the director of the ASU-LACMA Fellowship program at Arizona State University in Phoenix.