Antonia Wright

Last updated

Antonia Wright
Antonia Wright portrait.jpg
Antonia Wright by photographer Monica McGivern
Born
Antonia Wright

1979 (age 4445)
Miami, Florida, US
NationalityCuban - American
Occupation(s)Performance artist, poet, photographer, installation and video artist
Known for"State of Labor" (2022)
Websiteantoniawright.com

Antonia Wright [1] (born 1979) is a Cuban-American artist born in Miami, Florida. Through a multidisciplinary practice of video, performance, installation, sculpture, sound, and light, Wright responds to extremes of emotion, control, and violence as they relate to systems of power in society. Alpesh Kantilal Patel of Artforum wrote of her work, “the body is the true medium she explores.” [2]

Contents

In 2022, she was named one of “11 Artists Leading the Country's Cultural Conversation Right Now” [3] by Gotham Magazine for her work addressing social issues.

Background and education

Antonia Wright received an MFA in Poetry from The New School in 2005 and trained at the International Center of Photography in New York City graduating in 2008. [4]

Wright earned a second MFA in Art Practice from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2024. [5]

Career

Since 2009, Wright has been performing an ongoing piece entitled "Are You OK?" wherein she goes into the streets of various cities and cries while capturing the responses of those passing by. [6]

In 2013, Wright created "Be" a video showing the artist covered in 15,000 bees while practicing the movements of tai chi. [7] During Art Basel Miami that same year, Wright threw herself while nude through sheets of glass in "Suddenly We Jumped (Breaking the Glass Ceiling)" at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens [8] [9] inspired by the movement of Futurism.

In 2021, Wright debuted “Not Yet Paved” at Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida, where she converted a concrete mixer truck into a musical instrument that plays the song "Young, Latin, and Proud" by the musician Helado Negro.

Wright has received reviews in the New York Times [9] and Artforum. [10] Wright serves on the boards of Planned Parenthood North, South and East Florida, The Lotus House Shelter, and Locust Projects.

In 2022, the artist present a public talk to introduce Women in Labor a new digital installation project at Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida. Wright was in conversation with PAMM assistant curator Maritza Lacayo, and they talked about the role of feminist artists and curators on issues of reproductive freedom in a country post-Roe v. Wade. [11]

Exhibitions (selection)

Solo or two-person shows

She exhibited the video "Under the Water Was Sand, Then Rocks, Miles of Rocks then Fire" with Luis De Jesus Los Angeles in 2016, depicting the artist walking on and falling into a frozen lake, inspired by her own childhood experience of falling into a frozen reservoir near Boston. The installation included lights on timers night-blooming jasmine plants. [9]

Antonia Wright's 2017 installation Control at Spinello Projects — which involved metal crowd-control barricades — required viewers to sign waivers absolving the gallery from liability should the installation cause any harm. The work was inspired by the prevalence of barricades in Brooklyn, New York, where Wright completed a residency at Pioneer Works. [12]

Wright's solo show “I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail” at Spinello Projects, Miami, Florida in 2022 was a reaction to the reproductive rights crisis. [13]

In 2024, the Pérez Art Museum Miami featured the one-person presentation Antonia Wright: State of Labor, a sound composition created in response to the United States Supreme Court's 2022 overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade landmark decision. Wright's sound art piece is based on data released by the Guttmacher Institute about bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom in the country. The piece comments on the outcomes of the newly reviewed law in estates with current complete or partial bans on abortion care for birthing people. According to the exhibition text, by PAMM curator Maritza Lacayo,"the sounds are as personal as are the real-life effects of the Supreme Court decision." For instance, Wright's work touches on existing data and first-person accounts on one's need to seek out-of-state care, undergo unsafe procedures, carry an unwanted or harmful pregnancy. [14] [15]

Group shows

Select group exhibitions include “You Know Who You Are: Recent Acquisitions of Cuban Art from the Jorge M Pérez Collection,” El Espacio 23, Miami, FL (2023), “Sinking Feeling” at Or Gallery in Vancouver, Canada (2023), “On the Horizon" at The Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee (2022), “#fail” at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, Louisiana (2022), “Counter-Landscapes”, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona (2019), “Energy Charge: Connecting to Ana Mendieta” at ASU Art Museum.

Collections

Wright's work is in the permanent collection of Martin Z. Margulies, El Espacio 23, The Lotus House Shelter, Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, and NSU Art Museum in Ft. Lauderdale.

Awards

In the fall of 2015, Wright was an artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works, in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Wright was one of three to win the Miami New Times's MasterMind award. [16]

In 2022, during Miami Art Week, Antonia Wright along with her long-time collaborator, Ruben Millares, were the winners of the No Vacancy Juror’s Choice Award [17] [18] for their public artwork installed on the beach outside the Faena Hotel. [19]

Wright recently won the Ellies 2022 Creator Award, [20] was named a 2021 CINTAS Foundation Fellowship [21] finalist awarded to artists with Cuban heritage, and won a 2019-2020 South Florida Cultural Consortium Award. [22] She has been featured in New York Magazine's article, "The New Talent Show: Pot-Luck Culture" on the burgeoning salon scene in New York City. [23]

Legacy

In April 2012, Wright established an artist-in-residence program at Lotus House Shelter, in Miami, Florida. [24] [25] The artist lived there for one month. [26]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Isaac Julien</span> British artist and film director (born 1960)

Sir Isaac Julien is a British installation artist, filmmaker, and Distinguished Professor of the Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Ricardo Estanislao Zulueta is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and writer whose work has been exhibited internationally. Zulueta's interdisciplinary practice includes video, photography, software, mixed media, painting, sculpture, installation, public art/interventions, and performance. His work explores intersectional concerns of gender, sexuality, behavior, and identity within socio-political landscapes. His research and writing focuses on cinema, media, technology, queer studies, cultural studies, and art history.

César E. Trasobares, is a Cuban-American artist working primarily in collage, installation, and performance art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alfredo Jaar</span> Chilean-born artist, architect, photographer and filmmaker

Alfredo Jaar is a Chilean-born artist, architect, photographer and filmmaker who lives in New York City. He is mostly known as an installation artist, often incorporating photography and covering socio-political issues and war—the best known perhaps being the 6-year-long The Rwanda Project about the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He has also made numerous public intervention works, like The Skoghall Konsthall one-day paper museum in Sweden, an early electronic billboard intervention A Logo For America, and The Cloud, a performance project on both sides of the Mexico-USA border. He has been featured on Art:21. He won the Hasselblad Award for 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xaviera Simmons</span> American contemporary artist (born 1974)

Xaviera Simmons is an American contemporary artist. She works in photography, performance, painting, video, sound art, sculpture, and installation. Between 2019 and 2020, Simmons was a visiting professor and lecturer at Harvard University. Simmons was a Harvard University Solomon Fellow from 2019 to 2020. Simmons has stated in her lectures and writings that she is a descendant of Black American enslaved persons, European colonizers and Indigenous persons through the institution of chattel slavery on both sides of her family's lineage.

A. L. Steiner is an American multimedia artist, author and educator, based in Brooklyn, New York. Her solo and collaborative art projects use constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, and performance. Steiner's art incorporates queer and eco-feminist elements. She is a collective member of the musical group Chicks on Speed; and, along with Nicole Eisenman, is a co-curator/co-founder of Ridykeulous, a curatorial project that encourages the exhibitions of queer and feminist art.

Nicole Cherubini is an American visual artist and sculptor working primarily in ceramics. She lives and works in New York.

Rivane Neuenschwander is a Brazilian artist. She is known for work that explores language, nature, geography, the passing of time and social interactions. At times her works are interactive, involving viewers in spontaneous and participatory actions. In her installations, films and photographs, Rivane Neuenschwander employs fragile unassuming materials to create aesthetic experiences, a process she describes as "ethereal materialism". While her work in the 1990s focused mainly on various forms of mapping and the use of "simple, ephemeral materials familiar to people living in Brazil" such as garlic peels, ants, dried flowers, soap bubbles, spice, dust, coconut soap, water, and slugs, her more recent works have dealt more directly with politics, sexuality, and subjectivity, particularly as an expression of the "pain and indignation that accompanies life in Brazil" under the government of Jair Bolsonaro.

Josh Faught, is an American fiber artist and educator, who creates sculptures, textiles, collages, and paintings. His work incorporates techniques such as knitting, crochet, and weaving, and addresses topics of craft and queer history. His fiber sculptures, influenced by both domestic crafts and art styles such as abstract and color field painting, are often either hung on the wall or stretched over scaffolding such as garden trellises; they are three-dimensional but forward-oriented. He is San Francisco based.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paula Wilson</span> American artist

Paula Wilson is an African American "mixed media" artist creating works examining women's identities through a lens of cultural history. She uses sculpture, collage, painting, installation, and printmaking methods such as silkscreen, lithography, and woodblock. In 2007 Wilson moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Carrizozo, New Mexico, where she currently lives and works with her woodworking partner Mike Lagg.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dara Friedman</span>

Dara Friedman is an artist who creates film and video works that use a carefully orchestrated filming and editing process, often collaborating with individuals and communities to capture the expressive qualities of the human body.

Consuelo Castañeda is a Cuban artist, professor, and art critic whose work includes painting, installations, photography, graphic art, architecture, and print. She was a major part of a movement of the relationship between art and politics in the 1980s avant-garde scene and revolutionized how women were treated in the art world. Castañeda is also credited with helping to catapult the cultural production of the Cuban avant-garde onto the international stage and shifting the popular understanding of the relationship between art and politics in Cuba, as well as in broader Latin America. Castañeda was living in Miami, Florida until 2016, and then moved back to Havana, Cuba.

Jane Hart is an American curator, gallerist, and artist in New York City. She has worked as an art curator since 1993, having been a gallery owner at in Los Angeles and Miami, and a contemporary art professional in Manhattan and London. As an artist, she has exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions in South Florida and Cleveland, Ohio. Her specialty is contemporary collage, with works in private collections in the United States and abroad.

Tania Candiani is a Mexican artist known for her interdisciplinary, large-scale, multimedia installations. In 2011, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow.

Esteban Ramón Pérez is an American artist who produces multi-media paintings and sculptures. His sociopolitical artwork often emphasizes subjective memory, spirituality, and fragmented history. Pérez earned a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2017 and an MFA in painting and printmaking from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut, in 2019. Pérez's work has been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions, including shows at Artspace, New Haven, Connecticut; Eastern Connecticut State University Art Gallery, Windham, Connecticut; Transmitter Gallery, Brooklyn; James Cohan Gallery, New York; Gamma Galería, Guadalajara, Mexico; Calderón, New York; the Arlington Arts Center, Virginia; Charles Moffett, New York; and Lehmann Maupin, New York. Solo exhibitions include Staniar Gallery, Lexington, Virginia. Pérez was selected for the NXTHVN Fellowship Program and is a 2022 recipient of the Artadia Award. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Nash Glynn is an American artist working in painting, photography, and video. She is known for her nude self-portraits and minimalist landscapes and still lives. She frequently depicts herself in her paintings using a simple palette of just red, white, and blue. She has exhibited internationally at Company Gallery and Metro Pictures in New York, Vielmetter Los Angeles, the Victoria Miro Gallery and the Tate Modern in London, Maison Populaire in Paris, and the Latvian National Museum of Art.

Adler Guerrier is a visual artist working in photography, drawing, collage, and printmaking to comment on issues of place and identity. Guerrier lives and works in Miami, United States.

Karon Davis, is an American visual artist, and a founder of the Underground Museum in Los Angeles. She is known as a sculptor and an installation artist touching on issues of race and identity in America through representations of the human body. Her artistic practice is influenced by dance, theater, and moving image.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Fuentes</span> American gallerist

James Fuentes is an American gallerist whose eponymous contemporary art gallery opened in Manhattan, New York, United States in 2007.

Glexis Novoa is an influential Cuban visual artist and art writer who has been active since the 1980s. Novoa works in a variety of media including graphite wall and marble drawings, paintings, performance, site-specific installations, curatorial practice, and publications to comment on social issues, financial and political systems. Glexis Novoa lives and works in Miami, Florida.

References

  1. "aw – antonia wright". antoniawright.com. Archived from the original on March 24, 2016. Retrieved April 5, 2016.
  2. Kantilal Patel, Alpesh (June 3, 2014). "CRITICS' PICKS, MIAMI, Antonia Wright". ARTFORUM.
  3. "11 Top Artists of 2022". Gotham Magazine.
  4. "Antonia Wright". Oolite Arts. Retrieved April 15, 2023.
  5. "MFA Thesis Exhibition: Evidence of Things Unseen". MFA Art Practice. June 28, 2024. Retrieved September 17, 2024.
  6. "TRIAD | Antonia Wright – You Can Only Understand From a Distance". thetriad.org.uk. Retrieved April 5, 2016.
  7. Jesus, Carlos Suarez De. "Antonia Wright Leaves Spinello Buzzing". Miami New Times. Retrieved March 30, 2016.
  8. Services, Miami-Dade County Online. "Vizcaya Museum & Gardens – A Futurist Evening at Vizcaya, December 7, 2013". vizcaya.org. Archived from the original on March 28, 2016. Retrieved March 30, 2016.
  9. 1 2 3 McDermon, Daniel (September 14, 2016). "Re-enacting a Childhood Trauma on Video. For Art". The New York Times.
  10. Kantilal Patel, Alpesh (June 3, 2014). "Critic's Pick - Miami - Antonia Wright". Artforum.
  11. "Art in a Post-Roe Age with Antonia Wright and Maritza Lacayo • Pérez Art Museum Miami". Pérez Art Museum Miami. Retrieved August 9, 2023.
  12. Morgenstern, Hans. "Antonia Wright's Control Is So Intense Viewers Have to Sign a Waiver". Miami New Times. Retrieved April 15, 2023.
  13. "Antonia Wright "I Came to See the Damage That Was Done and the Treasures That Prevail" at Spinello Projects | Create! Magazine". www.createmagazine.com. Retrieved September 10, 2024.
  14. "Antonia Wright: State of Labor • Pérez Art Museum Miami". Pérez Art Museum Miami. Retrieved September 10, 2024.
  15. McCann, Allison; Walker, Amy Schoenfeld (May 24, 2022). "Tracking Abortion Bans Across the Country". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved September 10, 2024.
  16. LaVelle, Ciara. "New Times' 2017 MasterMind Winners Are Asif Farooq, Miami Music Club, and Antonia Wright". Miami New Times. Retrieved April 15, 2023.
  17. "No Vacancy 2024 – MB Arts & Culture" . Retrieved September 27, 2024.
  18. "ANTONIA WRIGHT & RUBEN MILLARES WIN JUROR'S CHOICE AWARD FOR LARGEST-EVER NO VACANCY, MIAMI BEACH". Miami Beach. December 8, 2022.
  19. "PATRIA Y VIDA". Faena Art. Retrieved September 27, 2024.
  20. "The Ellies 2022 Creator Award Winner". Oolite Arts.
  21. "The CINTAS Fellowships". CINTAS Foundation.
  22. "SOUTH FLORIDA CULTURAL CONSORTIUM (SFCC)". Miami Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs.
  23. "The New Talent Show: Pot-Luck Culture". New York. January 9, 2009.
  24. "Standing on the sun: Artist profiles homeless women of Miami's Lotus House". Our Miami. Archived from the original on April 17, 2016. Retrieved April 5, 2016.
  25. Yu • •, Betty (April 23, 2012). "Using Art To Heal At The Lotus House". NBC 6 South Florida. Retrieved September 27, 2024.
  26. "Using Art To Heal At The Lotus House". NBC 6 South Florida. April 23, 2012. Retrieved April 5, 2016.