Exhibition Talk – Turn of the Sea

Please join us on Saturday, March 4, 2023, from 2:00 - 3:30pm in the Lecture Hall and Main Gallery (3rd floor) for a very special event to celebrate the closing of Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez’s fabulous exhibition Turn of the Sea. For the past few months Nancy’s important multi-media work has inspired many conversations about topics including the history of colonialism, racial identity, Indigenous craft traditions, and eco-feminism. For this event, she will be joined by her friends and colleagues University of Nebraska, Lincoln professors Dr. Katie Anania and Dr. Amelia María de la Luz Montes.

Attendees are encouraged to read, download, and or/print the below articles before the event. Links to each of the articles can be found here:

Whose Latino? Amid Growing Numbers the Definition is Expanding

One Man Dies, and an Entire Uncontacted Tribe Dies in Brazil

These two recent articles demonstrate how the concepts in Nancy’s work resonate outside her exhibition. They also provide some starting points for expanded conversations between Nancy and Amelia on topics such as environmental and cultural extinction and global climate change. Amelia will also share Latin American eco-poetry, literary theory and crucial environmental science actions that are helping to deter the dangerous practice of deforestation. Both Nancy and Amelia believe in the importance of cultural memory; our understanding of the past is essential for living in the present. They will each share their research about preserving cultural memory, including their interest in the cultural equivalencies rather than difference, between the north and the global south.

We look forward to seeing you!

Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez is a Colombian-American, artist with an interdisciplinary practice. She grew up in Bogota as the child of a Colombian and a United States citizen and migrated to the United States as an adult. Her art is about the curious and intense experience of having physically migrated, yet still having a piece of herself rooted in Colombia. Her recent exhibitions in include Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, The Nerman Museum of Art, Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, Blue Star Contemporary, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, La Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador, The Sheldon Museum of Art, The Joslyn Art Museum, The Portland Museum; El Museo del Barrio and Bronx Museum of the Arts.

She was received many prestigious awards including the Doctorow Prize in Painting, a Nebraska Arts Council Grant, a Smithsonian Artist Fellowship; a Puffin grant; a Pollock Krasner grant; a NALAC grant and was nominated to the Joan Mitchel Foundation grant. Her work is collected by Karen and Robert Duncan, Jose Mugrabi, The Sheldon Museum, El Museo del Barrio, The Cleveland Museum, The Museum University of New Mexico, El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá, El Museo de Arte Moderno, Cali Colombia. Her work was reviewed by Hyperallergic, Terremoto, El Nuevo Herald, The New York Times, Artforum; The Paris Review, Time out, Art Paper and Art Nexus.

Dr. Amelia María de la Luz Montes is Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Institute for Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is also a Fulbright Scholar. Her specialties are Chicano/a and U.S. Latino/a literatures and theory as well as Creative Writing. Dr. Montes’s Penguin Classics edition of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel Who Would Have Thought It? was listed on the Latino Books Month List from the Association of American Publishers.  Her latest publications are in The Afro-Hispanic Review, The Latina/o Midwest Reader, (University of Illinois Press); The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Popular Culture, (Routledge); and in Latino/Latina Literature in the Classroom: 21st Century Approaches to Teaching (Routledge).  She is currently finishing two monographs: the first is a memoir on her Fulbright year in The Former Yugoslavia (The Ohio State University Press). A chapter from this book has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  The second is a creative non-fiction book entitled, Nothing Sweet About Me, which places a historical, medical, and personal perspective on Diabetes and its impact on U.S. Latino/a communities.

Dr. Katie Anania specializes in modern and contemporary art of the Americas, with a focus on environmental art history, feminism, and queer theory. Widely published on twentieth-century drawing, she is interested in the ways that artists and designers center their works’ material properties: by leveraging cheap materials such as paper and cardboard, for instance, or using soil, blood, disposable packaging, or edible matter. Her book, Out of Paper: Drawing, Environment, and the Body in 1960s America, forthcoming from Yale University Press, examines the shifting position of drawing in American studio practice in the long 1960s. This project has been supported by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Getty Research Institute, the Pittsburgh Foundation, and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University. She is currently a Faculty Fellow at UNL’s Daugherty Water for Food Institute, which co-sponsored her 2021 exhibition The Nature of Waste: Material Pathways, Discarded Worlds at the Sheldon Museum of Art. Her second book project, for which she will be in residence as a Tyson Scholar of American Art at the Crystal Bridges Museum in 2022, traces the use of food as a material in hemispheric feminist artworks of the 1970s. She also writes about art and design for Artforum, Slate, and The Brooklyn Rail.

This program is generously sponsored in part by a GIG Fund Grant from Arts Midwest.