Carlos Martiel

The 8th Floor
March 3 – June 18, 2022

NEW YORK, NY – February 11, 2022 – The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation is pleased to present Articulating Activism: Works from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Private Collection. Predominantly drawn from their Art and Social Justice Collection, which began in 2015, the formation of this branch of the collection celebrates the prescience and power of art at this particular location and moment in history. The exhibition will also encompass work from other areas of concentration in the Rubins’ collection, namely contemporary art from the Himalayan region and Cuba. Each of the artists are devoted to finding solutions rather than simply highlighting problems, visualizing issues that have been previously obscured, overlooked, or ignored. Curatorially speaking, the Foundation has always believed in art’s unique ability to inspire change, that art has a purpose and potential, and that a diverse range of voices, bodies, and perspectives enhances discourse. Articulating Activism seeks to posit artists in dialogue with one another – through material, space, and time – in ways that encourage exchange and lead to poignant correlations between those experiencing the works from multiple branches of this epic collection.

Featured artists: ACT UP, Belkis Ayón, Firelei Báez, Abel Barroso, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Tony Cokes, Ángel Delgado, Antonia Eiriz, Carlos Garaicoa, Guerrilla Girls, Gonkar Gyatso, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, Shaun Leonardo, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Armando Mariño, Carlos Martiel, Frank Martínez, Mary Mattingly, Ana Mendieta, Cirenaica Moreira, Michael Rakowitz, Hunter Reynolds and George Lyter, Dread Scott, Tsherin Sherpa, José Ángel Toirac, Betty Tompkins, Chungpo Tsering, José Ángel Vincench, and Jorge Wellesley.

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The 8th Floor | 17 West 17th Street, NYC (Between 5th and 6th Avenues)

The New York–based nonprofit Foundation for Contemporary Arts, founded in 1963 by John Cage and Jasper Johns, has named the 20 artists honored with unrestricted grants in 2022. This year, the Grants to Artists and John Cage Awards have increased in value from $40,000 to $45,000, resulting in an unprecedented $900,000 distributed through the two programs.

The visual artists honored this grant cycle are Eve Fowler, who works in photography and text-based media; interdisciplinary artist Matt Savitsky; and Joan Waltemath, an editor-at-large for the Brooklyn Rail whose abstract painting are assembled with an architect’s sensibilities. Autumn Knight, who creates performances and installations, was honored in the Performance Art/Theater category, as was Raven Chacon, who will appear in the 2022 Whitney Biennial.

The annual Grants to Artists program was established in 1993, and recipients are selected by the foundation’s board of directors, which is comprised of artists including Cecily Brown, Jasper Johns, Anne Collier, and Dean Moss.

“Since March of 2020 the Foundation for Contemporary Arts has significantly stepped up its grant-making, providing over $5.6 million in relief grants to individual artists,” Brown, a director of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, said in a statement. “This year’s growth to our core programs underscores FCA’s commitment to the artist community. We are honored, as artists, to recognize the work and perseverance of these twenty artists with unrestricted $45,000 awards.”

The full list of FCA’s 2022 grantees follows below.

Dance:
Anonymous, Leslie Cuyjet, Marguerite Angelica, Monique Hemmings, David Thomson.

Music/Sound:
Raven Chacon, Susie Ibarra, Laura Ortman, Pamela Z.

Performance Art/Theater:
JJJJJerome Ellis, Autumn Knight, Carlos Martiel, Brontez Purnell.

Poetry:
Kay Ulanday Barrett, Mónica de la Torre, Cedar Sigo.

Visual Arts:
Eve Fowler, Matt Savitsky, Joan Waltemath.

The John Cage Award:
Petr Kotik.

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November 10, 2021, 6–8 pm EST
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Cuban artist Carlos Martiel creates installation and performance works where his lone body undergoes ritualistic acts, pain, and extreme physical stress. While his socially engaged work challenges systems of violence, displacement, and immigration, the artist’s body under duress functions as a conduit for the histories and lived experiences of the Black body. These projects act as a commentary on oppressive and racist power structures, cultural hegemony, and global geopolitics.

Martiel’s latest work, Monumento II (Monument II, 2021), is a site-specific corporeal installation that makes visible the artist’s concerns with invisible power structures. This work follows Monumento I (2021), which featured Martiel’s blood-covered nude body as a temporary monument representing historically discriminated, oppressed, and excluded minorities in the United States. In this new presentation, Martiel will once again use his nude body while remaining handcuffed atop a tall pedestal in the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda. Evoking a living sculpture, he will endure this fixed position in silence for several hours as a form of activism and physical resistance against the abuses of power that affect marginalized communities of color. Through the duration of Monumento II, which will be presented during a special one-night event, visitors will be able to view the performance from multiple perspectives around the museum’s ascending ramp. This project has been commissioned by the Guggenheim’s Latin American Circle and is organized by Pablo León de la Barra, Curator at Large, Latin America, and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Associate Curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, New York.

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Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | 1071 5th Ave, New York, NY 10128, USA