Bronx Museum Curator Speaks at New Paltz

NEW PALTZ — On Wednesday, April 24, 2002, Senior Curator of The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Marysol Nieves, presents a slide-lecture titled Artists, Communities, and Museums: The Bronx Museum and Its Permanent Collection, A Case Study. The event begins at 7:30 PM in Lecture Center room 102 on the SUNY New Paltz campus. It is free and open to all.

Nieves’ talk will focus on a collaborative exhibition series, Conversations with the Permanent Collection, which draws from the Bronx Museum’s Permanent Collection and invites contemporary artists to develop projects in dialogue with specific themes or objects in the Collection.

Conversations provides artists with the unique opportunity to work collaboratively with other artists, local community-based groups, and residents to create new work and to push the boundaries of their artistic practices by working with innovative and experimental approaches. Likewise, adds Nieves, “it affords the Museum the possibility of re-examining its collection by encouraging different perspectives and critical contexts, while also supporting the creation of new work and stimulating audience engagement and participation in the visual arts.”

Participating artists include: Tomie Arai, Blondell Cummings, Whitfield Lovell, Carol Sun, and Judi Werthein.

Marysol Nieves currently holds the position of Senior Curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York. She is an art historian and curator whose areas of research include: contemporary art and theory, photography, twentieth-century and contemporary Latin American art, as well as issues pertaining to diversity and access in the museum and visual arts communities.

Nieves holds a M.A. in Art History and Criticism from the State University of New York, Stony Brook and a B.A. in Art History from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. Her most recent exhibitions include: Context: Recent Art from Cuba in the Permanent Collection (2001) and “Good Business Is the Best Art”: Twenty Years of the Artist in the Marketplace Program (2000), as well as solo exhibitions of the work of Rimer Cardillo, Willie Cole, Liliana Porter, Ernesto Pujol, and Juan Sánchez. Additionally, she is organizing solo exhibitions of the work of María Elena González (2002) and Valeska Soares (2003).

The Student Art Alliance, a funded member of the Student Association, sponsors the Art Lecture Series. For information on other upcoming arts events at SUNY New Paltz, go to www.newpaltz.edu/artsnews, or call 845-257-3872. Images of selected works from Conversations with the Permanent Collection can be found at www.newpaltz.edu/news/images/nieves.html.