With Diamela Eltit, Dalida María Benfield, Carla Herrera-Prats,
moderated by Gabriela Rangel
Friday, April 23, 6 pm
The Great Hall at The Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street
http://cooper.edu/art
My Secret Political ResistanceMy Secret Political ResistanceThis project was funded in part by generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Diamela Eltit is a novelist, cultural critic, and founding member of CADA. Eltit began her engagement with literature in her native Chile during the years of the Pinochet dictatorship when she participated in the collective CADA, staging art actions against the dictatorship, and published her first novels, Lumpérica (1983) and Por la patria (1986), to universal acclaim. She has published El Cuarto Mundo (1988), El padre mío (1989), Vaca sagrada (1991), Los vigilantes (1994), Los trabajadores de la muerte (1998), Mano de obra (2002) and Jamás el fuego nunca (2007). She is currently the Distinguished Global Professor of Creative Writing in Spanish at NYU and Professor at Metropolitan University of Technology, Santiago.
Dalida María Benfield is a media artist, scholar and activist whose current work engages questions of gender, de-coloniality, and geo-politics. Her videotapes, including Mujeres de Pilsen and Canal Zone, meditate on race, nation and feminist narration. She worked with the Chicago-based artists’ collective Video Machete from 1994 – 2007, which intersected media poetics and politics, popular education and community organizing. Benfield has taught widely, and is now a doctoral candidate at the University of California-Berkeley in Ethnic Studies with an emphasis in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies. She has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Carla Herrera-Prats received her BFA at “La Esmeralda,” in Mexico City, MFA at CalArts, and was a participant at the Whitney ISP. She was co-director of the gallery Acceso A in Mexico City and is part of the collaborative CAMEL. Herrera-Prats has shown her work in venues such as Centro de la Imagen, Museo Dolores Olmedo, Centre Vu, Artists Space, Art in General and The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore. Herrera-Prats was a Visiting Lecturer at SMFA in Boston, the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, CalArts and currently teaches at the Cooper Union.
Gabriela Rangel is the Director of visual arts at the Americas Society and curated exhibitions on Marta Minujin, Gordon Matta Clark, Paula Trope, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Juan Downey and Dias & Riedweg. Rangel has written catalog essays for Arturo Herrera (Transnocho Arte Contacto, 2009), Arte no es vida (El Museo del Barrio, 2008), Liliana Porter (Centro de Arte Recoleta) and co-edited A Principality on its Own (Americas Society-David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, 2006). She holds an M.A. in curatorial studies from the CCS at Bard College and an M.A. in media and communications studies from the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas.
For more information please contact The School of Art at The Cooper Union at 212.353.4200, [email protected], or http://cooper.edu/art.
