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  • Jannis Kounellis: Senza titolo (vele), 1993 / Art Basel 2024 Unlimited

    In this installation by Jannis Kounellis, nine Venetian sails evoke tales of seafaring, history, and memory. They are historic Venetian sails, spanning from the 17th-century to more contemporary ones, arranged in a fan-like configuration, their billowing forms suspended freely within the exhibition space. Each sail seems to rise upwards to form a singular, self-contained entity. Created for the 1993 Venice Biennale, the work reflects Venice’s cultural heritage and its geo-political connection to the Mediterranean. The Piraeus-born artist’s upbringing also resonates with the sea as a pivotal center of cultural exchange and historic significance. Amidst the backdrop of contemporary conflicts and refugee crises, the work bridges past narratives, present realities, and future possibilities, fostering a dialogue that transcends time.

    Jannis Kounellis (born 1936 in Piraeus; died 2017 in Rome) is considered one of the founding figures of the Arte Povera movement. In order to transcend the illusory boundaries of painting, he expanded the spectrum of artistic media by incorporating banal or crude everyday materials.

    Jannis Kounellis: Senza titolo (vele), 1993 / Kewenig at Art Basel 2024 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 13, 2024.

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    0 min
  • Nicholas Galanin: Seletega / Faena Beach, Miami Beach

    Nicholas Galanin’s “Seletega” at Faena Beach in Miami Beach is a site-specific art installation that recalls the Spanish galleons of the 16th century, symbolizing the irreversible impact of European colonialism on Indigenous lands. Rising over forty feet, the work features masts and sails partially buried in sand, reminiscent of Cortés’s strategy in 1519 of burning ships to commit his troops to conquest without retreat. The artwork, named after a phrase meaning “run, see if people are coming” in Lingít and Spanish, directly links this historical moment to themes of commitment and irreversible action. Galanin uses his art to critique colonial legacies and advocate for Indigenous rights.

    Nicholas Galanin: Seletega (run, see if people are coming/corre a ver si viene gente) / Faena Beach, Miami Beach. December 7, 2024.

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    Exhibition text (excerpt):

    Partially buried on the sands of Faena Beach, Tlingit/Unangax artist Nicholas Galanin presented a monumental site-specific installation, Seletega (run, see if people are coming/corre a ver si viene gente), in the form of a Spanish galleon’s masts, sails, and rigging emerging from under the sand. The work by Galanin rise over forty feet in height, tying the occupation of Indigenous Land to the initial invasion of the “Americas” to extract wealth for European aristocracy. In 1519, Cortés led a Spanish expedition to Mexico and ordered his ships to be scuttled. This was done to motivate his crew, who were exhausted after the long journey and to prevent them from retreating or joining forces with an enemy. Cortés’s actions sent a clear message to his men: there was no turning back. The Spanish expression quemar las naves (burn the ships) means to eliminate the possibility of retreating before a problem.

    The masts and sails of the galleon in this work evoke a decisive moment, symbolizing a point of no return, where past actions force a commitment to a new, uncertain future. This act, like burning one’s ships, speaks to the irreversible choice to move forward without the option of retreating, of charting a new course and never going back and the act of giving oneself to a cause or belief.

    Spray painted on the sails in Spanish and English (the first languages to colonize the Americas): “What are we going to give up to burn the sails of empire? Qué vamos a renunciar para quemar las velas y los aparejos del imperio? What are we going to build for our collective liberation? Qué vamos a construir para nuestra liberación colectiva?” These questions, marked on the sails, speak to past and present, asking visitors to consider their roles and responsibilities in shaping the future. Just as the ships were burned to make retreat impossible, the work asks us to reflect on what we must let go of to move towards collective liberation.

    Galanin’s work engages deeply with social issues, particularly those impacting Indigenous communities, inviting dialogues between Indigenous and non-Indigenous experience.

    About the artist

    Nicholas Galanin’s sculptures and multimedia installations reflect his heritage as a Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist while confronting colonial violences, including the ongoing exploitation of Indigenous culture. Asserting Indigenous autonomy and agency, his works often critique the spaces they inhabit. His contribution to the 2020 Biennale of Sydney, Shadow on the Land, dug a monumental grave for colonizer Captain James Cook; for the 2021 Desert X exhibition in California, Galanin erected the phrase “INDIAN LAND” in highly visible letters on Cahuilla ancestral territory and has participated in the 2017 Venice Biennale. Nicholas Galanin earned a BFA at London Guildhall University (2003), an MFA at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand (2007), and apprenticed with master carvers and jewelers. He currently lives and works with his family in Sitka, Alaska. Galanin participated in Desert X, Palm Springs (2021); Biennale of Sydney (2020); Venice Biennale (2017); Whitney Biennial (2019); and Honolulu Biennial (2019). Galanin’s work is in permanent collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Detroit Institute of Arts; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Denver Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Princeton University. He received an award from American Academy of Arts and Letters (2020) and received a Soros Arts Fellowship (2020).

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    3 min
  • Göttin + Maise: Videos Loops Tapes Frames Works / Hebel_121, Basel

    The Art Space Hebel_121 in Basel (Switzerland) just opened a show titled “Göttin + Maise: Videos Loops Tapes Frames Works”. In the front space the exhibition features videos in loops that change every day. On the occasion of the opening reception, a video documenting Daniel Göttin’s 2012 exhibition at Raketenstation Hombroich in Neuss (Germany), where he transformed four shipping containers with his tapes. The front space also features tapes as frames and sculptures (Block B1/9-B1/12, 2020/2021) by Daniel Göttin. In the back space additional works by Göttin are on display: Flat Plain (C1-C4, 2022) and Flat Fold (D1-D9, 2022). The exhibition runs until February 22, 2025.

    Hebel_121 is an art space, where artits have the opportunity to develop a site specific work in the front space, combined with an exhibition in the back space. The exhibition can be seen day and night. Hebel_121 has presented an international program since 1998.

    Göttin + Maise: Videos Loops Tapes Frames Works. Vernissage, January 4, 2025.

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    6 min
  • José Parlá: Homecoming / Pérez Art Museum Miami

    Born in Miami to Cuban parents, José Parlá’s art reflects his upbringing between the U.S. and Puerto Rico, drawing on Caribbean and Latin American influences like music, dance, and urban decay. His work features hybrid abstraction through unique mark-making, focusing on movement and layering. Pérez Art Museum Miami hosts “José Parlá: Homecoming,” his first hometown solo show, featuring new works and a live mural. After a severe bout with COVID-19 in 2021, which included a coma, stroke, and brain bleeding, this exhibition symbolizes his recovery and return to his roots, showcasing his resilience and cultural identity.

    José Pará: Homecoming / Pérez Art Museum Miami. October 6, 2024.

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    Exhibition text (excerpt):

    Born in Miami to Cuban parents, artist José Parlá (b. 1973, Miami; lives in New York) was raised between mainland United States and Puerto Rico. Influenced by his proximity to Caribbean and Latin American countries, he developed an interest in diverse cultural traits, including Cuban music, hip hop, reggae, calligraphy, dance, and urban architecture and its decay, all of which would become recurring themes in his work. Consistent with his blended culture, Parlá is interested in hybrid forms of abstraction. Through a unique mark-making process, grounded in movement and bodily gestures, Parlá produces a painterly stream of consciousness characterized by addition, erasure, and layering. His physical and textural artistic process challenges conventional visual culture.

    Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is honored to be hosting Parlá’s first solo museum exhibition in his hometown. Featuring a new series of never-before-seen works and a site-specific mural, José Parlá: Homecoming will ultimately mirror the artist’s studio. An elaborate, two-part exhibition will allow visitors to observe Parlá’s dance-like technique in real time as he paints a site-specific mural for the first iteration of the exhibition. The second iteration will see the museum gallery transformed and converted into Parlá’s studio—a room full of paint-covered tables, a lively Cuban-inspired record collection, and decades of Parla’s archival memorabilia.

    In 2021, Parlá contracted a life-threatening case of COVID-19—he was hospitalized and endured a four-month coma during which he suffered a stroke and significant brain bleeding. A radical departure from the traditional use of space in a museum, this presentation not only represents a homecoming to Miami, but also marks a return to himself and his practice after this experience. Celebrating the spirit of resilience and returning to one’s roots, José Parlá: Homecoming is a testament to the profound connections among personal history, art, and creative expression. In addition to the completed mural and studio re-creation, the exhibition will also feature a number of recent works Parlá created upon his return to painting. The result is a process-focused exhibition highlighting an expressionistic painter who conscientiously engages with issues relating to Cuban and broader diasporic identity.

    3 min
  • Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years / Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach


    The Bass Museum of Art presents “Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years,” running from September 25, 2024, to August 17, 2025, showcasing nearly three decades of work by the New York-based artist in her first major hometown exhibition. Feinstein’s art spans sculpture, painting, video, performance, and installation, focusing on themes of intimacy, vulnerability, and societal influences on identity. The exhibit features immersive environments, like the new site-specific installations “Panorama of Miami” and “Old Cutler,” which delve into Miami’s cultural and architectural history, reflecting the city’s juxtaposition of natural beauty with urban decay. These works explore the interplay of artifice in art, drawing from Miami’s vibrant yet conflicted identity, and integrating influences from art history, folklore, and popular culture into a narrative of transformation and illusion.

    Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years / The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, December 1, 2024.

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    Exhibition text (excerpt):

    The Bass Museum of Art announces a new exhibition as part of the 2024-2025 fall season, Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years, on view September 25, 2024, through August 17, 2025.

    Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years spans almost three decades of work by the New York–based artist and is her first major exhibition in her hometown. Displaying Feinstein’s multidisciplinary approaches to sculpture—which have encompassed painting, video, performance and installation over the course of her career—The Miami Years reflects on themes of intimacy, vulnerability and abjection, exploring Feinstein’s examination of societal factors that shape human behavior and female identity.

    Feinstein has often created enveloping environments that serve as exhibition scenography, at times incorporating wallpaper into her projects. The works in the exhibition showcase the artist’s recurring use of scenography, specifically the theatrical flat as a form that both exposes and reinforces the notion and structures of artifice and illusion.

    While early influences include figures like Carolee Schneemann and Kiki Smith, there is another powerful undercurrent in Feinstein’s work: Miami. The artist grew up in the “Magic City” during the 1980s. Miami, then and now, is defined by the collision of extremes: lush landscapes of extraordinary natural beauty juxtaposed with commercial overdevelopment and industrialization, glittering façades adjacent to crumbling urban neglect, and clashing architectural styles found in any single block. Florida—as the terrain of winter sunshine, Disney World, Art Deco, and American kitsch—is enmeshed in escapist fantasy while simultaneously embroiled in the conflicted realities of contemporary life, politics and the environment.

    Feinstein’s exhibition includes a new site-specific commission Panorama of Miami (2024), a massive installation of painted mirrored wall panels spanning thirty feet, where the artist explores how Americans and U.S. society absorb and appropriate European culture. Akin to the eighteenth-century panoramic wallpapers developed by Jean Zuber and Joseph Dufour, this modern-day tropical setting pictures the Miami region with its contradictory marks of sophistication and decadence, exuberance and decay. The architectural assemblages merge space and time with architectural styles culled from local history, from the Hotel Breakwater on South Beach’s Ocean Drive, to the Atlantis Condominium of Miami Vice fame, to the original Parrot Jungle, Miami Seaquarium, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, the Biltmore Hotel, and the long-closed Miami Serpentarium.

    Feinstein has often created enveloping environments that serve as exhibition scenography, at times incorporating wallpaper into her projects. Old Cutler (2024) is another new site-specific work commissioned by the Bass on view in the exhibition. Here viewers step into the representation of a lush landscape, initially rendered in charcoal on paper and then transformed into this room-scale wallpaper. Its design draws from an archival photograph of Old Cutler Road, a historic, banyan-lined thoroughfare in Miami intimately associated with Feinstein’s memories of growing up in South Florida.

    Feinstein’s vision of Old Cutler straddles a balance between enchanted and troubling, reminiscent of the foreboding dark forests that often serve as backdrops for fairytales and folk stories. The towering trees, thick brush, and twilight conjure a landscape brimming with the capacity for transformation, where beauty and fantasy veil potential danger and unease. Welcoming visitors into the exhibition, the work functions as a kind of liminal space between the exterior and the artist’s interior world.

    With fragmentation echoing throughout Feinstein’s artmaking practices, The Miami Years is Feinstein’s first exhibition to consider the underlying impact of South Florida’s collective imagination and extreme realities on her rich and sweeping ouvre. The artist wields a spectrum of cultural, social, aesthetic and art historical references—from eighteenth-century rococo paintings by Fragonard, to fairytales and folklore, to fashion advertising and the cultural traces of Los Angeles. Exaggerated, incongruent, cobbled-together and sometimes monstrous, Feinstein assembles these disparate parts and pieces—be they human forms, architectural relics or theatrical settings—into cohesive, compelling works.

    5 min
  • Daniel Buren: Voile/Toile – Toile/Voile / Art&Newport at Pérez Art Museum Miami

    For Art Basel Miami Beach Week 2024, Art&Newport presented Daniel Buren‘s “Voile/Toile–Toile/Voile” regatta at Pérez Art Museum Miami on December 2, 2024. Daniel Buren’s work consists of two parts. Initially, nine Sunfish sailboats race with Buren’s signature striped sails, these sails are displayed as paintings, ordered by their race finish. The piece was first performed in Berlin in 1975 and blends abstract painting with the concept of the readymade.

    Daniel Buren: Voile/Toile – Toile/Voile / Art&Newport at Pérez Art Museum Miami. December 2, 2024.

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    Exhibition text (excerpt):

    Daniel Buren’s Voile/Toile–Toile/Voile (Sail/Canvas–Canvas/Sail) Regatta. Art&Newport at Pérez Art Museum Miami. December 2, 2024.

    The work consists of two parts: a race of nine Sunfish sailboats with the artist’s custom-made striped sails, followed at a later date by an exhibition of the sails as paintings. The race will take place on December 2nd from 2:00-4:00pm in front of the Peréz Art Museum (1103 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, FL 33132).

    Voile/Toile – Toile/Voile is one of Daniel Buren’s most significant works. Originally made and enacted in Berlin in 1975 it characteristically deploys the trademark stripes, which Buren refers to as a ‘visual tool’. Voile/Toile – Toile/Voile translates as Sail/Canvas – Canvas/Sail and brings together the opposing traditions of 20th century modernism by alluding to both abstract painting and the readymade. Voile/Toile – Toile/Voile initially starts with a regatta where sailors race boats adorned with the nine Buren sails. Later the sails are taken to be displayed in a gallery or museum. The order of this display is dictated by the order the boats complete the race. This dual element within Voile/Toile – Toile/Voile is significant as the way the sails are seen and used during the regatta is so different form how they are displayed in the gallery. They move from being functional objects operating in the actual world to artworks to be publicly displayed. Voile/Toile – Toile/Voile challenges the viewer’s assumption of the limits of artistic language and its possibility. Curated by Dodie Kazanjian, the work will be exhibited at the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) at a later date.

    Daniel Buren (b. 1938) has been the subject of major museum exhibitions worldwide. He has exhibited in the Venice Biennale more than 10 times and was awarded the Golden Lion in 1986. Buren participated in documenta V, VI, and VII. In 2007, he received the Praemium Imperiale for Painting from Japan and was selected to exhibit at MONUMENTA 2012 at the Grand Palais in Paris. He has been the subject of large-scale, solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN, the Art Institute of Chicago, Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, Bozar in Brussels, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Metz, and Malaga, Guggenheim New York and Bilbao, among countless other institutions. Daniel Buren lives and works in situ.

    Presented by Art&Newport in partnership with The Great Elephant Migration and The ReefLine, with special thanks to the Miami Yacht Club, Coconut Grove Sailing Club and Sunfish. Sponsored by Xerjoff.

    Art&Newport aims to develop and host a series of city-wide visual arts presentations in Newport, Rhode Island. It was inaugurated in the summer of 2017 with exhibitions and events, all free and open to the public, in Trinity Church, the Newport Art Museum, and the Redwood Library & Athenaeum.

    5 min
  • VernissageTV Magazine No. 57: Angel City

    Out now: VernissageTV Magazine No. 57, December 2024. In this issue: Stefan Simchowitz, Ruth Erdt, Lowrider Icons of the Street and Show, Anthony Heinsbergen, Edward Durell Stone.

    Click image or this link to download the magazine (200 MB) or order print copy via Peecho.

    All issues are available in our Magazine section.

    0 min
  • Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths / Institute of Contemporary Art Miami

    ICA Miami introduces Lucy Bull’s (b. 1990, New York) first U.S. museum exhibition, “Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths,” showcasing her vibrant abstract paintings. Bull’s work, known for its dynamic energy and tension between color and form, explores the boundaries of perception and psychic landscapes. The show features sixteen paintings from 2019-2024, including new large-scale pieces. The exhibition is curated by Gean Moreno at ICA Miami and runs until March 30, 2025.

    Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths / Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Miami. December 6, 2024.

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    Exhibition text (excerpt):

    ICA Miami presents the first U.S. museum exhibition of Los Angeles–based painter Lucy Bull (b. 1990, New York), “Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths.” A singular voice in contemporary abstract painting, Bull’s dynamic practice explores the formal and experiential concerns of the medium. Through a dynamic application of paint, Bull choreographs energetic gestures into eruptive fields of pictorial activity. In her works, exuberant colors and elusive forms, reference and atmosphere, density and transparency are in constant tension.
    Bull’s works sit at the edge of language. In them, the macroscopic and the microscopic tend to swap places, as landscapes often morph into depictions of internal psychic spaces. Worlds congeal momentarily in her paintings, only to surrender again to a dynamic of constant transformation. Bull’s works are enlivened by modulating emotional temperatures and by the courting of far-reaching associations. Ultimately, they push viewers’ awareness of looking to the forefront: optical overload and disruptive dissonance move typical perception into a hypersensitive mode.

    “Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths” includes sixteen paintings produced between 2019 and 2024. Among these are recent large-scale horizontal works that stretch over ten feet across. These expansive works inaugurate a new field of exploration for the artist and are brought together for the first time here. Alongside these, the exhibition includes a number of vertical paintings that continue the artist’s pictorial research over the last decade.

    In parallel to the exhibition, Bull will create the next stairwell commission at ICA Miami, which will be on view through September 2025.

    Bull has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2024), The Warehouse, Dallas (2023); Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai (2023); David Kordansky Gallery, New York (2022), Pond Society, Shanghai (with Guo Fengyi, 2021); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2021), High Art (Arles, 2020; Paris, 2019); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2019); Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2019); and RMS Queen Mary, Mother Culture, Long Beach, California (2017). Recent group exhibitions include “13 Women: Variation I,” Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, California (2022); “Abstract Vocabularies: Selections from the Collection,” Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2021); and “Present Generations: Creating the Scantland Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art,” Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio (2021). Her work is in the permanent collections of Baltimore Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; MAMCO, Geneva; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, among other institutions.

    “Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths” is organized by ICA Miami and curated by Gean Moreno, Director of the Art + Research Center at ICA Miami.

    4 min
  • Old Young, Young Old. Artistic Views by Two Appenzellers / Haus Appenzell, Zürich

    The current exhibition at Haus Appenzell in Zürich (Switzerland) is dedicated to two Appenzell-born artists from different generations: Ludwig Stocker (1932), who grew up in Herisau and now lives in Basel, and the “headstrong Appenzeller” Stefan Inauen (1976). In their sculptures, both take up figures, objects and materials that revolve around the old and the new, transience and permanence in their very own way. Ludwig Stocker uses polystyrene as a metaphor for ageing and for vulnerability and instability in life. Stefan Inauen, on the other hand, presents discarded chairs under the catchy title “Friends of hopeless chairs” and presents them in a new artistic light. The exhibition is titled “Old Young, Young Old. Artistic Views by Two Appenzellers” and runs until March 29, 2025. In this video, Ernst Hohl (founder and president Ernst Hohl-Kulturstiftung Appenzell) and Hao Hohl (Curator Haus Appenzell, Board of Trustees) talk about Haus Appenzell and the current exhibition (in German language, English subtitles available).

    Old Young, Young Old. Artistic Views by Two Appenzellers / Haus Appenzell, Zürich. November 21, 2024.

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    0 min
  • Liz Cohen: Trabantimino, 2002-12 / Pérez Art Museum Miami

    As part of the group exhibition Xican-a.o.x. Body, the Pérez Art Museum in Miami features artist Liz Cohen’s artwork Trabantimino. It’s basically a lowrider version of a Trabant, a small car produced from 1957 until 1991 by former East German car manufacturer VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau, customized using General Motors parts and hydraulics. Liz Cohen was born in 1973 in Phoenix, Arizona, where she lives and works.

    Liz Cohen: Trabantimino, 2002-12 / Pérez Art Museum Miami. December 6, 2024.

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    Exhibition text (excerpt, sources: PAMM, Liz Cohen website):
    Although customizing automobiles may have long been perceived as a male-dominated pastime, Liz Cohen’s fascination developed in Phoenix, where she grew up witnessing and subsequently participating in lowrider culture. Cohen’s Trabantimino is also inspired by her Colombian heritage and her family’s relationship to Communism in that country. The ten-year process of transforming the small East German automobile into a hybrid sculpture that evokes the Chevrolet El Camino consisted of the artist learning mechanical engineering from mentors at Worldwide Customs, Oakland; Elwood Bodyworks, Scottsdale, Arizona; and Kustom Creations, Detroit. Trabantimino plays into larger questions of mixed identity and culture. Cohen posed with the car during and after her pregnancy while dressed like a lowrider model, offering an alternate vision of female sexuality, and blurring the line between fantasy and motherhood.

    Xican-a.o.x. Body is the first major exhibition to showcase work by artists who foreground the body as a site of political agency and imagination, artistic investigation, decolonization, and alternative forms of community. The exhibition’s title is based on the term, Chicano, that is traditionally defined as an ethnic identity for Mexican Americans who embrace their indigenous ancestry. The exhibition emerges at the intersection of experimental artistic practices dating back to the Chicano Movement’s key years in the 1960s and 1970s and embraces the work of artists who identify in myriad ways—including Mexican American, Chicana/o, Xicanx, Indigenous, Latinx, Black, Brown, and Queer.

    “For roughly a decade, I focused on the fabrication of a car. Originally a Trabant, the Trabantimino transforms into an El Camino through hydraulics in its expanding chassis. The wheel‐base expands 3 feet to the wheel‐base of the El Camino, and the rear of the car extends an additional 3 feet to match the length of a 1973 Chevrolet El Camino.

    A series of events led me to purchase an East German Trabant in Berlin in 2002. The Trabant was produced in East Germany from 1959-1991 during the socialist era. It embodied the East German values of utility, simplicity and resourcefullness. It’s 2 stroke engine had only 7 moving parts and as fiberglass was unavailable, the cars panels were made with waste products mixed with resin—in the beginning shredded wool military uniforms and later paper waste.

    I decided to bring it back to the US and turn it into an El Camino in order to become a fringe member of American custom car culture. If the Trabant was the utopian East German car, the El Camino was the utopian American car. Also produced during the Cold War period, the El Camino was the one stop shopping car—it had the speed of a muscle car, the comfort of a sedan, and the utility of a pick up truck. Like all things utopian, these cars also exposed the pitfalls of what is lost in translation from big idea to tangible product. The Trabants were stinky and slow. Although they were meant to be cheap to manufacture in the hopes that every East German would have one, people waited on lists for years in order to get one. As for the El Camino, you simply can’t have it all in one package. The car didn’t do any of the things it set out to do well. A full load in the flat bed of an early El Camino could crack its frame.

    I used the hydraulic technology that is used in lowriders to power the transformation of the car. Lowriding is an immigrant subculture that blossomed during the same Cold War time period that the Trabant and the El Camino were manufactured. What I love about lowriding is that it started off as a culture of defiance. Rather than tune and perfect with the aim of hot rod speed. Lowriders were meant to go low, slow and clown or call attention. They were a display of creativity by a marginalized latino culture in East Los Angeles and around the southwest. The Trabant can never be an El Camino, but it can’t be a Trabant anymore either. Through the transition a space is created for a new vehicle. —The refusal to surrender to the impossible necessitates invention.”
    (Liz Cohen)

    2 min

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