February 26, 2022
Recital Hall, Arts Building: 10 am - 2 pm
Free parking on Saturday in surface lots and all unmarked spaces.
For live streaming access:
https://utsa.zoom.us/my/scott.sherer
Visibility and Presence is a symposium of artist•curator•writer•activists sponsored by the UTSA Main Art Gallery focusing on diversity, equity, inclusion, and change in contemporaryart and curated exhibitions.
Featuring:
Kate Bonansinga (Cincinnati), Leslie Moody Castro (Las Cruces, NM), Benito Huerta (Arlington, TX), Vicki Meek (Dallas)
Moderated by Aïssatou Sidimé-Blanton, (San Antonio)
Kate Bonansinga, (Cincinnati)
Kate Bonansinga is Director, School of Art, College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at University of Cincinnati, where she is also a professor and teaches courses about curatorial practice. She was the founding director of Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Art at The University of Texas at El Paso where she curated dozens of exhibitions and established an undergraduate minor in museum studies. She is interested in museums as dynamic sites for learning, in the impact of art in gallery and non-gallery settings, and in the current methods that artists employ to instigate positive social change. Bonansinga is the author of Curating at the Edge: Artists Respond to the U.S./Mexico Border (University of Texas Press, 2014) and of numerous articles and book chapters. She served as guest curator of Tania Candiani: Sounding Labor, Silent Bodies(Contemporary Arts Center, 2020-21) and American Painting: The Eighties Revisited (Cincinnati Art Museum, 2021-22).
Leslie Moody Castro (Las Cruces, NM)
Leslie Moody Castro is an independent curator and writer whose practice is based on itinerancy and collaboration. She has produced, organized, and collaborated on projects in Mexico and the United States for more than a decade, and her repertoire of critical writing is also reflective of her commitment to place. She is committed to creating moments of artistic exchange and dialogue and as such is a co-founder of Unlisted Projects, an artist residency program in Austin, Texas. In 2017, she was selected as Curator and Artistic Director of the sixth edition of the Texas Biennial, and was recently the first invited curator in residence at the Galveston Artist Residency. Moody Castro earned a Master's degree at The University of Texas at Austin in Museum Education with a portfolio supplement in Museum Studies in 2010, and a Bachelor's degree in Art History at DePaul University in Chicago in 2004, and has been awarded two grants from the National Endowment of the Arts for her curatorial projects (2016, 2017). She is currently the inaugural curatorial fellow at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces. In addition to her firm belief that the visual arts creates moments of empathy, Moody Castro also believes that Mariachis make everything better.
Benito Huerta (Arlington, Texas)
Huerta received a B.F.A. degree from the University of Houston, and his M.A. from New Mexico State University. He was Co-founder, Executive Director and Emeritus Board Director of Art Lies, a Texas Art Journal. He is a Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington where he has been Director/Curator of The Gallery at UTA since 1997.
His work will be featured in a one-person exhibitions, “As the World Turns” at Kirk Hopper Fine Art in Dallas in spring of 2022 and in “InterSection” at William Campbell Gallery in fall of 2022. Recent one-person exhibitions were “Odd Ducks and Other Assorted Tales” at William Campbell Contemporary Art, Fort Worth; “Entr’acte” at Reavley Gallery, Cole Art Center at Stephen F. Austin University. Huerta has also exhibited at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, Houston Museum of African American Culture; the Wichita Falls Museum of Art; the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth; the Glassell Gallery, Shaw Center for the Arts, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. His work is in several museum and corporate collections throughout the United States.
Huerta was the recipient of the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art’s 2002 Legend of the Year Awardand Exhibition and was the first Maestros Tejanos Exhibition in 2008 at the Latino Cultural Center, Dallas. He recently completed a public art project for the University of Texas at Arlington, Signs of Life, which was installed in August, 2019. Other recent work is Urban Still Life, South Main Street project, Fort Worth installed in 2017. Other completed public art projects are the Marine Creek Park Corridor Master Plan in 2014, Fort Worth; SnakePath (Mexican Milk Snake), Mexican American Cultural Center, Austin, Texas (2007); Wings, DFW International Terminal D Skylink terrazzo floor designs (2005); and Axis, Henry Gonzales Convention Center, San Antonio.
As a curator he recently organized a survey exhibitions of Mel Chin for The Gallery at UTA, University of Texas at Arlington and Cesar A. Martinez for the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago. Other surveys/retrospectives exhibitions he has organized are of David McGee, John Hernandez, Luis Jimenez, Dalton Maroney and Celia Alvarez Munoz.
Vicki Meek (Philadelphia)
Vicki Meek, born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a nationally recognized artist who has exhibited widely. Meek is in the permanent collections of the African American Museum in Dallas, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana, Paul Quinn College in Dallas, Serie Art Project in Austin and Norwalk Community College in Norwalk, Connecticut. She was awarded three public arts commissions with the Dallas Area Rapid Transit Art Program and was co-artist on the largest public art project in Dallas, the Dallas Convention Center Public Art Project.
Meek was selected as one of ten national artists to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Nasher Sculpture Center with the commissioning of a site-specific installation. Meek’s retrospective “Vicki Meek: 3 Decades of Social Commentary” opened in November 2019 at Houston Museum of African American Culture and marked the end of her concentrating solely on her installation practice as she moves into creating work using video as the primary medium. She dubs these new works video comments since they are no more than 8 minutes in length and are done in a series format.
Vicki Meek has been awarded a number of grants and honors including National Endowment for the Arts NFRIG Grant, Dallas Observer MasterMind Award, Dallas Museum of Art Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Grant, Texas Black Filmmakers Mission Award, Women of Visionary Influence Mentor Award, Dallas Women’s Foundation Maura Award, nominated for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the African American Museum at Dallas A. Maceo Smith Award for Cultural Achievement and was selected as the 2021 Texas Artist of the Year by Art League of Houston.
In addition to having a studio practice, Vicki Meek is an independent curator and writes cultural criticism for Dallas Weekly with her blog Art & Racenotes ( http://artracenotes. blogspot.com) and also wrote a monthly column, ARTiculate for TheaterJones, an online performing arts magazine.
Meek was an adjunct faculty member for UMass Arts Extension Program in Amherst, Massachusetts where she taught a course in Cultural Equity in the Arts. With over 40+ years of arts administrative experience that includes working as a senior program administrator for a state arts agency, a local arts agency and running a non-profit visual arts center, after 20 years, Vicki Meek retired in March 2016 as the Manager of the South Dallas Cultural Center in Dallas. She served on the board of National Performance Network/Visual Artists Network 2008-15 and was Chair from 2012-2014. In 2016, Meek was selected to be a Fellow in the Intercultural Leadership Institute and also became a Voting Member of Alternate Roots, a national artist service organization.
Vicki Meek currently spends time as Chief Operating Officer and Board Member of USEKRA: Center for Creative Investigation, a non-profit retreat for creatives in Costa Rica founded by internationally acclaimed performance artist Elia Arce. She is also Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson’s at-large appointment to the Arts and Culture Commission and the Public Art Committee. Meek is represented by Talley Dunn Gallery in Dallas, Texas.
Aïssatou Sidimé-Blanton, Moderator (San Antonio)
Aïssatou Sidimé-Blanton (She/Her) is a collector of contemporary visual art by African American women, and Vice President and former curator of the San Antonio Ethnic Arts Society (SAEAS), a more than 35-year old POC arts organization that coordinates public art exhibits and raises funds to underwrite one-on-one art training for youth in San Antonio, TX. She also is a member of the San Antonio Area Foundation’s Community Advisory Committee that approves arts-related grants. A former newspaper reporter, Sidime-Blanton has contributed arts-related articles to International Review of African American Art, San Antonio Express-News, Black Focus magazine, Tampa Tribune, and Blackbook.com. She has facilitated exhibitions at former StoneMetal Press Printing Studio for Valerie Maynard, MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, John T. Scott, Steve Prince and Deborah Roberts of Austin. She has curated a survey of regional contemporary African-American women artists focusing on Texas women at the Carver Community Cultural Center in San Antonio (2014); a poetry-visual art exhibition at Gemini Ink and Southwest School of Art (2015); and most recently “Re/Devaluing Colorism: The Intersections of Skin Color and Currency,” an exploration of the roots, tentacles and offshoots of global Colorism. It featured 14 female artists, a commissioned poetry-dance performance, teen-girl art workshop, activities for art teachers, tips for parents by a diversity trainer, and full-color catalogue at the Southwest School of Art (December 2019 through April 2020). She and her husband, Stewart Blanton, also partnered with the San Antonio Ethnic Art Society to underwrite the SAEAS Abaraka Award, a $3,000 biennial grant that supports visual arts, arts research and curatorial projects by African-American women artists/art professionals; for more information go to SAEthnicArtSociety.org.
Exhibition Gallery
