Talk between Xaviera Simmons and Cristiana Tejo
24th May – 6pm
Adress:
Hangar – Rua Damasceno Monteiro, 12 r/c 1170-112 Lisboa
Xaviera Simmons’ sweeping practice includes photography, painting, video, sound, sculpture, text and installation. Her work engages the formal histories of art through the construction of landscape, language, and the complex histories of the United States and its continuing empire building internally and on a global scale. Simmons received her BFA from Bard College (2004) after spending two years on a walking pilgrimage retracing the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade with Buddhist Monks. She completed the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art (2005) while simultaneously completing a two-year actor-training conservatory with The Maggie Flanigan Studio, NY.
Recent solo exhibitions include Crisis Makes A Book Club at The Queens Museum (2023) “Nectar” at Kadist, Paris (2022), “The Structure, The Labor, the Pause” at Sarasota Art Museum (2022), “Convene” at Sculpture Center, New York; “Overlay” at Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University; “The Gold Miner’s Mission to Dwell on the Tide Line” at The Museum of Modern Art- The Modern Window, New York; and “CODED” at The Kitchen, New York. In 2021 Simmons was the inaugural guest editor of Art Basel Magazine
Recent museum group exhibitions include The Momentary at Crystal Bridges, Desert X, Sprengel Museum Hannover, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro; MassArt, Boston; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Seattle Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; Prospect.4, New Orleans; Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan; Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Cincinnati Art Museum; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, among others. Simmons’ work has been featured and reviewed in many publications; most recently in ArtNews, The Art Newspaper, Artnet News, Artforum, Hyperallergic, New York Magazine, Bloomberg, Paper Magazine, The New York Times and others.
Simmons’ works are in major museum and private collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Deutsche Bank, New York; UBS, New York; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Agnes Gund Art Collection, New York; The De La Cruz Collection, Miami, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Studio Museum in Harlem; ICA Miami; Perez Art Museum Miami; The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro; The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham; The High Museum, Atlanta; among many others. She has held teaching positions at Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University and The School Of The Art Institute, Chicago.
Simmons has held teaching positions at Yale University, Columbia University and Harvard University. In Spring 2020 she was awarded the prestigious The Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters from Bard College. Simmons is a recipient of Socrates Sculpture Park’s Artist Award (2019) Agnes Gund’s Art for Justice Award (2018), as well as Denniston Hills’ Distinguished Performance Artist Award (2018). The artist has exhibitions, performances, large scale installations and web based projects slated to open globally through 2025
Cristiana Tejo is an independent curator, Ph.D. in Sociology (UFPE) and an integrated member of the Institute of Art History of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She is a researcher on the project “Artists and radical education in Latin America: 1960s/1970s”, coordinated by the researchers Giulia Lamoni and Margarida Brito Alves. She organizes together with Kiki Mazzuchelli the Belojardim Residence, in the Agreste of Pernambuco. She was the co-founder of Espaço Fonte – Center for Research in Art (Recife) and curator of the Made in Mirrors Project, which involved exchanges between artists from Brazil, China, Egypt and the Netherlands. She was general coordinator of Scientific and Cultural Capacity Building and Cultural Directorate of the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation and co-curator of the 32nd Panorama of Brazilian Art of MAM-SP, with Cauê Alves. She was Director of the Museum of Modern Art Aloísio Magalhães, curator of Fine Arts of the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation (2002-2006), curator of the Rumos Artes Visuais of the Itaú Cultural (2005-2006), visiting curator of Malakoff Tower (2003-2006) and curator of the 46th Salon of Plastic Arts of Pernambuco (2004-2005). Among her recent curating works are Tomorrow is another day – Mónica de Miranda, at Galeria Carlos Carvalho (Lisbon), Landscape Time – Karina Dias (Caixa Cultural Brasília) and Bruscky Invent’s (Dan Gunn Gallery, Berlin). She has participated in several selection and awarding commissions, among them: Bonnefanten Contemporary Art Prize 2014 (Maastricht, Netherlands), Videobrasil 2013, Solo Projects – Focus Latin America (ARCO Madrid, 2013), Rumos Artes Visuais of Argentina, among others. Published Paulo Bruscky – Arte em todos os sentidos (2009), Panorama do Pensamento Emergente (2011) and Salto no Escuro (2012). She organized the book Paulo Bruscky – Arte e multimeios (2014) and Cinco Dimensões da Curadoria (2017). She contributes regularly to the magazines Select (Brazil) and Terremoto (Mexico). Lives and works between Recife and Lisbon.
