Conocimiento: Migration, Displacement, & Community Organizing

WP professor of art history and Latin American/Latinx Studies and curator of the University Galleries spring exhibition El Cartel/The Poster: Puerto Rican Graphics Alejandro Anreus will moderate a panel discussion examining colonization and resistance in Puerto Rico and Latin America through the visual arts. Panelists include artist Juan Sánchez and Susanna V. Temkin, curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York City. This panel discussion takes place during the Conocimiento Experience Student Conference on Belonging and Community Organizing sponsored by the Office for Student Diversity & Inclusion, the Student Government Association, the University Galleries, and other campus partners.

• Juan Sánchez will present on two public art projects
• Susanna V. Temkin will present on graphics and community in the El Museo del Barrio permanent collection
• Alejandro Anreus will discuss the iconography of resistance and affirmation

Juan Sánchez was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY of Afro-Puerto Rican parents. He attended the Cooper Union (BFA) and Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers (MFA). He is a distinguished professor of art at Hunter College, his work is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Whitney, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the African American Museum in DC, the Wilfredo Lam Center in Havana, the Zimmerli Museum in Rutgers, El Museo del Barrio, etc. He has received every major award (except the McArthur Genius grant) given to a visual artist, such as the Guggenheim, Joan Mitchell, Pollock Krasner, Mellon Latinx Artist, etc. A major monograph on his life and work is currently in preparation for the A Ver series.

Susanna V. Temkin has been the Curator at El Museo del Barrio since August 2018. Previously she was the assistant curator at the Americas Society and worked on the Joaquin Torres-Garcia catalogue raisonne project. Dr. Temkin received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, where she wrote her dissertation on modernist Cuban painter Marcelo Pogolotti. Her most recent exhibitions at El Museo are the group show Domesticanx, and the retrospective of the late sculptor Juan Francisco Elso. She is currently writing an essay for the Rafael Soriano catalogue raisonne.

Alejandro Anreus is Professor of Art History and Latin American/Latinx Studies at William Paterson University. He has degrees in art history from Kean University and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Among his numerous publications, he recently co-edited Mexican Muralism: A Critical History with Robin Adele Greeley and Leonard Folgarait. He also published Luis Cruz Azaceta, in conjunction with a traveling exhibit of the artist’s work. Anreus focuses on modern and contemporary periods, with a specialty in the crossroads between Latin American and American art from the 1920s to the 1960s, Latino art, and African American art. His curatorial history at William Paterson includes an exhibition of Cuban painter Rafael Soriano’s surrealist portraits of heads; and Memory Keepers, an installation by sisters iliana emilia and Scherezade García. He is the curator of El Cartel/The Poster: Puerto Rican Graphics, a selection of 28 prints by Puerto Rican and Nuyorican graphic artists now proudly part of the University Galleries’ permanent collection.

Image: Juan Sánchez, Grito, 2022, mixed media collage on masonite panals,  24 x 36 x 2 inches, image courtesy of the artist.