Valerie Cassel Oliver Speaks About Her Role as Guest Curator of Project Row Houses Round 54: Southern Survey Biennial
Valerie Cassel Oliver is one of the world’s most respected curators. The Los Angeles Times called her recent groundbreaking exhibition “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse” a tour de force, and one of the best exhibitions of the year.
On Saturday November 12, 2022, the acclaimed Oliver comes to Houston to discuss her work as Guest Curator of Project Row Houses Round 54: Southern Survey Biennial. She speaks at 2:00 pm at Project Row Houses located at 2521 Holman Street in Houston.
Project Row Houses debut of the Dr. Dina Alsowayel and Tony Chase Round 54: Southern Survey Biennial is on view through Sunday, February 12, 2023. Round 54: Southern Survey Biennial was designed to celebrate the creative vitality of artists working in the Southern States. The eight Round 54 selected artists mirror the diversity and robust energy of a new South. There are vibrant intersections where cultural traditions and art practices are pushed into new territories that challenge conventional thinking and delight our senses with beauty, humor, and wonder. Participating artists are Naomi Lemus, Rashayla Brown, Rehab El Sadek, and Sedrick Huckaby of Texas; Julien Hyvard, Kandy Lopez, and Victoria Ravelo of Florida; and Carlie Trosclair of Louisiana.
From Valerie Cassel Oliver, Guest Curator
Since its founding in 1993, Project Row Houses has realized great success in celebrating the vitality of its artistic communities. Those communities have encompassed a range of artists from established icons in the field to the under-recognized and newly emerging. For nearly 30 years, PRH has served as a nexus for artistic innovation, advocacy, and experimentation that informed and incorporated local voices with those from around the globe. The intentionality behind this social experiment has reverberated across the United States and beyond as other various projects have established similar programs designed to integrate national and global practices and dialogues into the very fabric of local communities with the capacity for reciprocal exchange. The resonance of Project Row Houses continues to inform and inspire.
On the eve of a new decade this venerable organization is now looking inward. And it is perhaps within the spirit of self-reflection that Round 54: Southern Survey Biennial has emerged as its newest endeavor. I am honored to serve as the inaugural juror for what I hope will become a vital platform for artists working within the southern region that is now being acknowledged for its historical and contemporary significance. Round 54: Southern Survey Biennial is designed to celebrate the creative vitality of artists working in the Southern States defined as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.
For the inaugural Round, I was pleased to see the expansiveness of community. The eight selected artists mirror the diversity and robust energy of a new South. There are vibrant intersections where cultural traditions and art practices are pushed into new territories that challenge conventional thinking and delight our senses with beauty, humor, and wonder. Their work also reflects the recent and fraught moments of our contemporary times. The global pandemic revealed crippling health and economic disparities, the ongoing barbarism of racism, catastrophic climate change, political crisis, and a profound lack of civility.
The artists selected to participate in this inaugural event – Rashayla Brown, Rehab El Sadek, Sedrick Huckaby, and Naomi Lemus of Texas; Julien Hyvrard, Kandy Lopez, and Victoria Ravelo of Florida; and Carlie Trosclair of Louisiana – have wrestled with the issues inherent in current encounters and/or the residual experiences of the past three years. Moreover, each artist has dealt with the enormity of those issues and the anxiety of uncertainty through their own unique creative expression from performance to painting, sculpture to the moving image, and photography. Their work has something to teach us about survival and the stubborn persistence of being, isolation and loss, and the intention of being deliberate.
It has been an immense honor to serve as juror and Guest Curator to encounter new work by artists known to me as well as those who I now have the opportunity to know in depth. And congratulations to Project Row Houses on sustaining a practice that continues to elevate community. The South continues to be an ever-evolving landscape that creates and inspires.
About the PRH Round 54: Southern Survey Artists
2517 – Carlie Trosclair
Carlie Trosclair’s sculptural installations explore the liminal space between development and deconstruction; contemplating the living and transitional components of home. Growing up in New Orleans as the daughter of an electrician, Trosclair spent her formative years in historic residential properties at varying stages of construction and deconstruction. She found that even when abandoned, the presence of the body still lingered. Reflectively her work reimagines the genealogy of home by highlighting structural and decorative shifts evolving over a building’s lifespan. Using latex as an architectural skin, she creates ghostlike imprints that mark an in-between space that is transient and ever changing: both structurally and in our memory. Trosclair’s select artist residencies include: Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (NE), Joan Mitchell Center (LA). Loghaven Residency (TN), Tides Institute & Museum of Art (ME), MASS MoCA (MA), chashama (NY), Oxbow (MI), Vermont Studio Center (VT), and The Luminary Center for the Arts (MO). Trosclair’s work has been featured in Art in America, The New York Times, ArtFile Magazine, and Temporary Art Review, among others. She is the recipient of the Riverfront Time‘s Mastermind Award, the Creative Stimulus Award, Regional Arts Commission Artist Fellowship and the Great Rivers Biennial Award. Trosclair earned an M.F.A from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, a B.F.A from Loyola University New Orleans, and is an alumni of the Community Arts Training Institute in St. Louis.
2515 – Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB)
Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB) is an “undisciplinary” artist-scholar exploring how aesthetics can enact radical thought beyond mere representation. These works blend installation design, photography, performance, writing, video and filmmaking with the implementation and critique of power structures. International presentations include Embassy of Foreign Artists, Geneva; Recess, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Rhodes College, Memphis; Tate Modern, London; and Turbine Hall, Johannesburg.
2513 – Rehab El Sadek
Rehab El Sadek (1972) is a conceptual Egyptian artist whose been exhibiting internationally for thirty years. She utilizes architectural structures, light, shadow, and memory to investigate the layered reality of the immigrant experience. And creates alternative spaces that invite viewers to question existing power dynamics and contemplate the role of individuals—especially the marginalized. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues including; L.A. Freewaves, The Geffen Contemporary Art at MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; Sharjah Biennial; Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, Mali; Gasworks Gallery, London; Borusan Sanat Galerisi, İstanbul; Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; Nairobi National Museum, Kenya; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria: The Women’s Museum, Dallas; Mexic-Arte Museum; and The Elisabet Ney Museum, Austin. In 2009, El Sadek was one of 88 female artists included in REBELLE: Art and Feminism 1969-2009 – an extensive forty-year survey of feminist artwork organized by the Museum voor Moderne Kunst in Arnhem, Netherlands.
2511 – Sedrick E. Huckaby
Sedrick E. Huckaby offers this statement: “I was born in Fort Worth in 1975 and I continue to live and work in the same area today. It has been an inspiration to come home to serve my community after being given the opportunity to study art at Boston University, Yale University and at museums all over the world. After learning about the global art world, I also learned another simple lesson. The art that I am most often occupied with is about the themes, people and places of my hometown. I found that I could address the issues of global importance through dealing with the same issues within my local community. So, I decided to move back home. Since returning I have married Letitia, who is also an artist, specializing in photo-based art. Our creativity is not limited to art, we also have three creative children: Rising Sun-16, Halle Lujah-14, and Rhema Rain-6.”
2509 – Victoria Ravelo & Naomi Lemus
Victoria: Born in Miami, Florida to Cuban exiles, Victoria Ravelo‘s practice begins at the intersection of personal, ancestral, and collective memory. Her drawings, photographs, sculptures and installations utilize abstraction and metaphor to tease apart the multi-layered histories that form a time and place. Contending with the tension between what is lost and what can only be remembered, Ravelo’s work simultaneously explores, connects, and cultivates cultural roots that modern society actively works to erase. Ravelo earned an MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in 2021, and a BFA from the University of Miami in 2015. Recent solo projects include: “Hidden in Plain View,” a project in collaboration with the community while in residence at Locust Projects, Miami, FL (2021), and “A Place for Us,” Temple Contemporary, Philadelphia, PA (2021). Recent group exhibitions include: “Borders and Portals,” University City Arts League, Philadelphia, PA (2022); “Radical Pleasure,” Spady Museum, Delray Beach, FL (2022); “Introspective: A Reckoning of the Soul,” Art and Culture Center/ Hollywood (2021). Ravelo recently curated “Familiar Distances,” Edge Zones, Miami, FL (2021), and is a resident of “Oolite’s Home + Away Anderson Ranch,” Snowmass, CO (2022).
Naomi: Born in Houston, Texas to Mexican immigrants, Naomi Lemus focuses on the history of her family, the reality and struggles faced by immigrants. She utilizes materials like fibers, archival documents and found material to explore and emphasize the pain, suffering, as well as achievements she has witnessed as a first generation American. Naomi attended San Jacinto College North from 2013-2016 and received her BFA in Painting at University of Houston in 2018. She also received an MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Philadelphia, PA in 2021 and currently teaches at San Jacinto College.
2507 – Julien Hyvrard
Julien Hyvrard is a medium fluid documentarian and conceptual artist. Based in the Southern US since 2015, he is currently photographer and video maker for Oui Collective, the creative workshop he co-cofounded in Miami. Born and raised in France, he studied philosophy at Sorbonne University. He spent 9 transformative years in Buenos Aires, where he began experimenting with documentary form and conceptual series. At the confluence of three cultural and linguistic streams, from France to Argentina to the US, collaborative at heart, Julien’s practice is generally process-oriented, open ended, reiterative and often aporetic. It involves time-based documentation, site-specific installation and performance. Julien’s work has been supported by Bass Museum (Miami), Perez Art Museum (Miami), Mana Contemporary (Miami), Jean Brolly Gallery (Paris), Centre Culturel Bruegel (Brussels) and he is currently juror of the following short film festivals: Venezia Shorts (Italy), Indie Shorts Award (New York), Hollywood Shortfest (LA), and Cannes Indie Shorts Awards (France).
2505 – Kandy G Lopez
Kandy G Lopez was born in New Jersey and moved with her family to Miami. She received her BFA and BS from the University of South Florida concentrating in Painting and in Marketing and Management. She received her MFA with a concentration in Painting from Florida Atlantic University in 2014. She has taught at Florida Atlantic University, Daytona State College, and is now the Program Director for the Art + Design program as well as an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Media and the Arts in the Halmos College of Arts and Sciences at NOVA Southeastern University. As a multimedia artist, Lopez explores constructed identities, celebrating the strength, power, confidence and swag of individuals who live in urban and often economically disadvantaged environments. As a female Afro-Caribbean figurative artist she is eager to be challenged materialistically and metaphorically when representing marginalized individuals that inspire her. Her work was created out of the necessity to learn something new about her culture. Lopez is interested in developing a nostalgic dialogue between the artwork and the viewer. She makes work to be included in the history of visual arts. Kandy G Lopez’s work has been exhibited in several galleries and museums throughout the country and internationally. Recent exhibitions include two solo exhibitions funded by the Broward Arts Council at the Girls’ Club Collection Warehouse and the Frank C. Ortis Gallery in Florida.