DALLAS, Texas (September 26, 2023) – The Nasher Sculpture Center announces Nasher Prize Dialogues: Sculpture and Place in the Caribbean, presented in partnership with the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC). The conversation will take place at the MAC in San Juan, Puerto Rico on November 9, 2023, at 6 p.m.
The panel explores how place, in particular the Caribbean, shapes artistic practice, speaking to artists who produce sculptures and installations that are intrinsically linked to the culture, geography, or history of the islands on which they live and work. The panel includes Minia Biabiany of Guadeloupe, Engel Leonardo of the Dominican Republic, and Daniel Lind-Ramos of Puerto Rico. The discussion will be moderated by MAC curator Marina Reyes Franco.
This conversation will be in Spanish with live translation into English. A recording will be available on the Nasher’s YouTube channel after the event.
The discussion is part of Nasher Prize Dialogues, the discursive platform of the Nasher Prize, the international prize for a living artist in recognition of a body of work that has had an extraordinary impact on the understanding of sculpture. The Dialogues are intended to foster international awareness of sculpture and to stimulate discussion and debate. Programs— including panel discussions, lectures, and symposia—are held in cities around the world on a yearly basis, offering engagement with various audiences, and providing myriad perspectives and insight into the ever-expanding field of sculpture.
Previous Nasher Prize Dialogues programs have occurred in partnership with the New Museum, New York; CHART, Copenhagen, Denmark; Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland; The Common Guild, Glasgow; Sixth Floor Museum, Dallas, TX; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in partnership with the Henry Moore Foundation, and included artists such as Nina Baier, Martin Boyce, and Michael Elmgreen; Theaster Gates and Ragnar Kjartansson; Jacolby Satterwhite and Mika Rottenberg; Pedro Reyes, Amalia Pica, Damian Ortega, and Sanford Biggers; Alfredo Jaar, Jill Magid, lauren woods, and Paul Ramirez Jonas; Michael Dean, Phyllida Barlow, and Eva Rothchild, among others.
Registration will be available on the Nasher Sculpture Center’s website: https://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/programs-events/calendar
About Minia Biabiany (Guadeloupean, 1988)
Minia Biabiany works and lives in Guadeloupe. In her practice she observes how the perception of the body is entangled with the perception of space, land and History. Often through installations and videos, she invokes the gestures of weaving by creating poet and political narratives linked with self-understanding and healing. Her work explores the possibility of an enunciation out of the dominant colonial storytelling, particularly in the context of Guadeloupe and the consequences of the French assimilation in the relations between the people the land and the plants.
In 2016 Minia Biabiany initiated the artistic and pedagogical collective project Semillero Caribe in Mexico City and continues to explore the deconstruction of narratives with the sensations of the body and concepts from Caribbean authors with the experimental platorm Doukou.
She studied in the Fine Art school ENSBA Lyon in France. Her work has been shown in the Xth Biennale de Berlin, TEOR/éTica in Costa Rica, Witte de Wite in Rotterdam, Cràter Invertido in Mexico, Prix Sc Po 2019 in Paris, SIGNAL in Malmö. In 2022 she had a solo exhibition at Palais de Tokyo and her first multilingual monograph Ritmo Volcan came out at the edition house Temblores.
About Engel Leonardo (Dominican, 1977)
Engel Leonardo resides and works in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
The relationships between humanity and history, architecture, and material culture are central themes in Engel Leonardo's work. His creative process often involves research into Antillean culture, modern tropical architecture, narratives suppressed by modernity, and the transmission of indigenous and African knowledge through objects typically categorized as craft, folklore, or ethnographic. Leonardo has a particular interest in architectural and craft narratives that challenge notions of tropicality, modernism, indigenous culture, and the Afro-Atlantic heritage.
Currently, he is engaged in the Bahoruco project spanning the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Antilles, Cachoeira, Salvador, the Bahian Recôncavo, and the Amazon region in Manaus, Brazil. This project delves into the resistance against the power discourses of colonialism, modernity, and capitalism through the exploration of territories, spiritualities, and ecosystems in the Antilles and the Americas.
Engel Leonardo's works are part of prestigious collections, including the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), Museo Guggenheim (New York), CNAP (Paris), Kadist (Paris-San Francisco), CPPC (New York-Caracas), and MAM (Santo Domingo). He has held solo exhibitions at the MAC Niteroi (Rio de Janeiro) and Kunsthalle Lissabon (Lisbon). Currently, Leonardo is participating in the collective exhibition "Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora" at MCA Chicago and ICA Boston
About Daniel Lind-Ramos (Puerto Rican, 1953)
Working in an assemblage sculptural mode to evoke the storytelling traditions embedded in his Afro-descendent history, Daniel Lind-Ramos draws forth the oral, culinary, and musical history which sustains the spirit of the once enslaved and Cimarrón community in Puerto Rico. The artist combines found materials and gifted things of his childhood, altering them with specific painterly touches, patterns, and forms. Each component is further transformed by its encounter with the harmonious whole, the sculptures eventually acquiring a spirit-like presence. The sculptures acquire a spirit-like presence, while being immediately tied to the present through an emphatic sense of recovery, reuse, and rejuvenation necessary in the artist’s homeland, ravaged by hurricanes and locked in an asymmetric colonial relationship with the United States.
Daniel Lind-Ramos’s work was included in the 2019 edition of the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and was the recipient of a 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation grant. In 2021, Lind-Ramos was awarded the prestigious McArthur Foundation’s Genius Fellowship Award for his contributions in sculpture. This year, MoMA PS1 presented the largest exhibition of his work to date titled El Viejo Griot — Una historia de todos nosotros. The exhibition will remain open until September 4th, 2023.
In the past two years, Lind-Ramos’s works have entered numerous public collections such as The National Gallery of Art, District of Columbia; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Perez Museum, Miami, FL; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland OH; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MACPR), San Juan, Puerto Rico.
About Marina Reyes Franco
Marina Reyes Franco is a Curator at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC). Some recent projects include Puerto Rico Negrx, co-curated with María Elena Ortiz, focuses on artistic production by Afro Puerto Rican artists in the archipelago and the diaspora from the 1990s to the present; Tropical Is Political: Caribbean Art Under the Visitor Economy Regime, at Americas Society and MAC; El momento del yagrumo, at MAC; De Loiza a la Loiza, a MAC en el Barrio public art commission by Daniel Lind Ramos; Resisting Paradise, at Publica, San Juan and Fonderie Darling, Montreal; Watch your step / Mind your head, ifa-Galerie Berlin; The 2nd Grand Tropical Biennial in Loiza, Puerto Rico; C32: Sucursal, MALBA in Buenos Aires. As curator and researcher, she has focused on the work of Esteban Valdés, artistic and literary manifestations on the frontier of political action, and the impact of tourism in cultural production in the Caribbean.
Press contact:
Adrienne Lichliter-Hines
Manager of Communications and International Programs
+1 214.242.5177 (p)
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About the Nasher Sculpture Center:
Located in the heart of the Dallas Arts District, the Nasher Sculpture Center is home to the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, one of the finest collections of modern and contemporary sculpture in the world, featuring more than 400 masterpieces by Brancusi, Calder, de Kooning, di Suvero, Giacometti, Basquiat, Hepworth, LeWitt, Matisse, Miró, Moore, Picasso, Rodin, Serra, and Shapiro, among others. The Nasher Sculpture Center is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 am to 5 pm. Admission is $10 for adults, $7 for seniors, $5 for students, and free for children 12 and under and members, and includes access to special exhibitions.
For more information, visit www.NasherSculptureCenter.org.
About Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (San Juan, Puerto Rico) is artist founded museum that fosters an open view of contemporary art from multiple perspectives that converge in Puerto Rico: Diasporic, Latinx, Caribbean-regional and Latin American cultures within a global context. It is a collecting institution, a space of production and creation, as well as of research and conservation, that encourages a constant dialogue between artists and audiences through its cultural equity programs developed on and offsite.
For more information, visit www.museomac.org