BLACK HOLE SUN
The Monochrome in Art
Curated by Raul Zamudio
Sept 14th
Wine Reception - 5-9 PM

Houston Art Advisory
3420 Rusk St, Suite 4
Houston, Texas 77003

Dress Code: Monochromatic

HoustonArtAdvisory.com

Houston Art Advisory is pleased to present as its Inaugural Exhibition Black Hole Sun: The Monochrome in Art, Curated by New York-based independent Curator and Writer Raul Zamudio.

The mixed-media exhibition of international artists takes its title from the eponymous song by Soundgarden. More than just homage to one of the most iconic bands to come out of Seattle’s Grunge music scene with its charismatic lead singer Chris Cornell, the exhibition explores the monochrome within the context of contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation, and performance-based work.

The history of the monochrome is a colorful one beginning with the early twentieth-century Russian painter Kazimir Malevich and his other-worldly, Suprematist canvases, to the Neo-Plasticism of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian who was inspired by, among other things, the theosophy of Victorian spiritualist Helena Blavatksy, and on through Minimalism of the 1960s and Post-Minimalism at the end of the twentieth century. Today, there are few artists that work in a singular color or even a pared down palette, but it is a genre still practiced whose counterpart in contemporary culture is underscored in colloquialisms including “green with envy,” “red as a beet with anger,” and "blue with sadness." Not only are emotions conveyed through monochromatic metaphors but other euphemisms too: “heart of gold,” "yellow rain," “greenbacks,” etc. While the artworks in Black Hole Sun are formally unified by their restrained color and expressed in both pure abstraction and representational styles, their content is diverse in addressing a myriad of themes of a topical, historical, political, social, and/or personal nature.

WAITING FOR THE GARDEN OF EDEN

CURATED BY RAUL ZAMUDIO AND JUAN PUNTES

MARCH 30TH THROUGH MAY 5TH, 2019

OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, MARCH 30TH, 4-7PM

Waiting for the Garden of Eden is a multi-media group exhibition that culls its title from Pedro Pietri’s iconic Puerto Rican Obituary (1973), and inaugurates White Box’s new exhibition space in East Harlem. The stanza is part of Pietri’s performance poem that revolves around a Puerto Rican family in East Harlem that endlessly confronts inequalities succinctly phrased in which the family “All died yesterday, today, and will die again tomorrow.”

Puerto Rican Obituary is a timely work and pertinent to use as curatorial foil to topically explore some 46 years later, the changing demographic of East Harlem, New York City, and to a larger extent the USA. Rather than dovetailing only on the challenges the family faces in Pietri’s poem, Waiting for the Garden of Eden expands this to flesh out realities that immigrants face transnationally and American citizens of color negotiate locally within the shifting parameters of East Harlem, New York City, and the broader USA. Gentrification, identity, globalization, and socioeconomic disparity are just some of the points of thematic departure in the exhibition that are formally articulated via painting, sculpture, work-on-paper, photography, video, sound art, and performance. Waiting for the Garden of Eden will be supplemented throughout its exhibition run by performances, panel discussions, and readings.

Waiting for the Garden of Eden features works by Yelaine Rodriguez, Arnaldo Morales, Tania Candiani, Nayda Collazo-Llorens, Edwin Torres, Arleene Correa Valencia, Yucef Merhi, Monica Rodriguez, Jorge Tacla, Charles Juhasz-Alvarado, Blanka Amezkua, Edgar Serrano, Eduardo Gil, Alicia Grullón, Leonardo Madriz, Ruben Natal-San Miguel, Bernardo Navarro Tomas, Risa Puno, and Norma Vila Rivero, and Chico MacMurtrie.

Roi Vaara: I Did It My Way

[installation view of exhibition] 

Roi Vaara: I Did It My Way

One night only, 6-8pm, 11/23/18, Empty Circle, 499 3rd Ave. Brooklyn, NY. Nearest Subway stop: F, G or R trains to 4th ave/9th st. Free and open to the public. A Proyectos Raul Zamudio/Bureau of Curatorial Affairs production with support from the Empty Circle https://www.emptycirclespace.com/artraulzamudiocurator/

Internationally acclaimed performance artist Roi Vaara makes rare New York City appearance. The evening begins with a 6 pm reception and presentation of a carefully curated selection of videos and performance documentation that surveys Vaara's 500+ performances in over 50 countries. Following this will be a live performance by Roi Vaara. 

Everything and Nothing

Curated by Raul Zamudio

White Anxieties

September 21-October 13, 2018

Curated by Raul Zamudio and Juan Puntes with Peter Wayne Lewis

Since the twenty-first century, the U.S. seems to be in a state of accelerated social transformation and this has been cause for alarm for many conservative, White Americans. One of the most notable benchmarks of these changes is Barack Obama’s election as America’s first African-American president. Researchers also predict that in the coming decades, Latinos/Hispanics will be the largest demographic in the U.S. superseding the current White majority. Other communities that have been historically marginalized and now ostensibly asserting their rights including LGBTQ, have added to the perception that we are living in a different America than in the past. Another phenomenon altering the American social landscape is the influx of immigrants that some construe as potentially usurping the purported dominant culture and its traditions. Even Donald Trump’s campaign slogan of Make America Great Again, subliminally harks back to a reactive era of intolerance and exclusivity.

White Anxieties is a mixed media, international group exhibition that takes the pulse of what haunts the conservative, American psyche. That is, an anxiety-inducing America that is less white, heterosexual, and male, and where other languages than English are spoken and where People of Color can openly express their cultural traditions without accusations of not being “real” Americans. Some works in the exhibition, for example, address the dismantling of Confederate monuments, the problematics of assimilation, and xenophobia’s prevalence while others target the most disturbing manifestation of American socio-political regression and of an America historically unresolved: David Duke and acolytes who run for political office while attempting to normalize their racial supremacist ideology.

Rent Is Too Damn High

Rent Is Too Damn High

Curated by Roma Primitivo Albear and Raul Zamudio
The Apartment
Apt.4S, 23 Avenue B, NY, NY
Opening October 18, 2017, 6-9pm
October 18-22, 2017

Artists: Diogenes, Julia San Martin, Avelino Sala, Damian Ontiveros, Aaron Burr-Society, Claudia Baez, Adolfo Doring, Stefano Cagol, Emma McCagg, Revjen Miller, Hawk Alfredson, Clayton Patterson, Agni Zotis, Toyo Tsuchiya, Rona Lebbo, Katya Zvereva, Daniel Sanchez, Nick McManus, Fly, Destiny Mata, Asya Stepanova, Russel Murphy, Roman Alver, Yasira Nun,Riiko Sakkinen, Marlis Momber, Antony Zito, Aubrey Roemer

Power Imagination Secret Society and Bureau of Curatorial Affairs are pleased to present Rent Is Too Damn High!, curated by Roman Primitivo Albear and Raul Zamudio.

Updating the platform of New York City’s independent political party by which the exhibition culls its title, Rent Is Too Damn High! is an exhibition of international artists that work in painting, work-on-paper, sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance.

While the eponymous political party’s mandate was to reveal the ongoing displacement of communities in the wake of New York City’s real estate boom, Rent Is Too Damn High! expands these concerns to encompass other indirectly related issues that are of a global as well as a local nature. In doing so, Rent Is Too Damn High! comments on how transnational politics effects the social life of a neighborhood and vice versa. This symbiosis is easily discerned in the current U.S. presidential administration in which some of its members are both landlords in the greater New York City area and agents in policies negatively impacting the world-at-large. Further underscoring this dynamic is an art exhibition whose venue itself is in the ensuing battle of gentrification: in an apartment in New York City’s Losaida community.

Thanks to Cornerstone Cafe for their support of Rent Is Too Damn High!

[photo: Destiny Mata]

The Border Pavilion

The Border Pavilion

Curated by Raul Zamudio

29-09-01-10

Part of Jeannette Doyle CF Project

Research Pavilion, Venice, Italy

Artists: Anney Bonney, Robert Boyd, Stefano Cagol, Shahram Entekhabi, Scherezade Garcia

Ferran Martin, Cleverson Oliveira, Damian Ontiveros, Nadja Verena Marcin, Rikko Sakkinen, Avelino Sala, Julia San Martin, Teresa Serrano, Celia Elsamieh Shomal, Daniel Silvo, S et P Stanikas, Carlo Zanni

“I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me” 

― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

The Border Pavilion is a program of video works by international artists that focus on the global geopolitics of the border. As a component of the Research Pavilion’s thematic of engaging the Venice Biennial model of national representation in order to question the politics of its exhibition structure, The Border Pavilion extends this framework by encompassing what Edward Soja conceptualized as “ThirdSpace” and Homi Bhabha’s notion of the interstitial regarding agency in the wake of post-colonialism. That is to say, a social space and subjectivity that is syncretic and protean and foundational for an empowered and emancipatory political imaginary.  

[The Immigration sign is an American highway safety sign warning motorists to avoid immigrants darting across the road. It depicts a man, woman, and child with pigtails running. The signs were erected in response to over one hundred immigrant deaths due to traffic strikes from 1987 to 1990 in two corridors along Interstate 5 along the San Ysidro Port of Entry at the Mexico-United States border ]