Ten Costa Rican artists are selected to present their artistic work in an exhibition dedicated to Costa Rica organized by the Museum of the Americas, in Denver, United States.
The exhibition titled Costa Rica: Always Live Work and Peace will show the public, for four months, objects from the museum’s private collection. Also works of contemporary art.
“The Museum of the Americas is honored to present an exhibition that we have been waiting for a long time. Exhibiting about Costa Rica, in the themes and ways in which we are planning it, is to bring new perceptions and visions about Costa Rica in the United States.
“We know that Costa Rica is a country about which you can have different perceptions. But we also wanted to talk about its great cultural wealth through art and present Costa Rica from different angles,” explained Claudia Morán, Executive Director of the Museum of the Americas.
“Always live work and peace”
Curated by Costa Ricans María Paula Morera and Mauricio Cruz, the exhibition features six Costa Rican artists and two artist collectives working in a variety of artistic mediums.They work in areas such as fashion, sculpture, textile art, painting, photography, video, installation, and graphic design.
“Always live work and peace” is an excerpt from the National Anthem and really when we were looking at the lyrics we thought, is this really our reality as Costa Ricans?We started to question that and saw value in expanding that concept artistically and internationally from different people’s perspectives. Each of the artists in this exhibition have had different life experiences, as well as different talents, and that is what we wanted to unite through different artistic mediums,” Morera said.
According to its curators, beyond its idyllic image, Costa Rica represents a fresh social panorama, which gives rise to new social groups that express their opinions and question the prevailing national political options.
About the pieces to be exhibited and their authors
Génesis López de la O:
Nuances of a Shared Resistance. It is a photographic piece that portrays the women participating in the International Women’s Day street protests in San José during 2019, 2021 and 2022.
Through a collage of photographs, the exhibition aims to reflect the diversity of realities that Costa Rican women experience in their fight for gender equality and the eradication of gender violence.
Edwin Godinez and Andrés Gómez (Myno):
The work El Paraíso seeks to rescue the three types of forests (rainy, cloudy and dry) that exist in Costa Rica. This through an audiovisual installation that will allow viewers to feel immersed in these three types of landscapes in a dynamic and interactive way, using techniques such as photography, illustration and 3D.
Leimy de la Rosa and Terrasha Morgan:
Fuckboy is a video by the national singer and artist Terrasha, produced and directed by Leimy de la Rosa. Fuckboy refers to those men with whom a relationship cannot be formalized.
They see the woman as a sexual object and not as a more complex being. Likewise, the audiovisual is an ode to Afro-descendants, a culture that is part of Costa Rica, but that still suffers a lot of social segregation.
Mauricio Cruz:
This montage of four mannequins represents the work of the design brand from the presentation of its first collection to its most recent. All the pieces presented are inspired by some microworld of Costa Rican nature. For example: birds, insects and mushrooms, intertwined with the avant-garde vision of the brand.
Alonso Campos:
The artist will present three paper sculptures that resemble stuffed butterflies, which function as a network of metaphors. Here it is explored that when we seek to treasure our memories we do a similar job to those who practice taxidermy, in their effort to preserve them.Alonso’s work is immersed in an effort to self-explore and dialogue with his experience and identity as a trans, racialized person raised in rural areas.
Emma Segura:
The pieces that make up the Trans Itinerary collection represent an autobiographical approach. This from soft sculpture to the body and trans identity as an exercise in the politicization of the private.
They are based on a critical exercise of rereading and subversion of traditional techniques such as sculpture, pattern making, embroidery, felting and the use of natural dyes, using hand-woven materials, contrasted with synthetic materials inside.
Federico Herrero:
The series of photographs shows the ever-changing relationships between nature and urban structures, a constant dialogue that occurs in countries like Costa Rica. His work seeks to erase the division between the work that occurs within the studio and the public space, pointing out that paintings in contemporary works frame our behavior in public spaces, creating a new field of action.
Annabella Prins:
In this narrative series of triptych photographic self-portraits, called The Unfolding, Prins explores her identity and her inner self to create a metaphor for paradoxical roles. And roles that women often experience in society and her journey to create permanence and adaptation as a migrant.
“We believe faithfully in representation and diversity and this is definitely an exhibition based on that, designed to celebrate the diversity, work and art of people. Mainly those that have not been celebrated as they should be and that deserve greater recognition.
“This is a step forward to see Costa Rica as a fertile and wonderful terrain to work, with too much talent, where even though there are not all the opportunities that we would like to have, we believe that these types of initiatives allow us to motivate artists. to want to move forward,” commented Cruz.
Exhibition
The exhibition “Costa Rica: Always live work and peace” will be available from Thursday, September 14, 2023 until Sunday, January 28, 2024 at the Museum of the Americas in Denver.
It is the leading museum of Latin American art in the Rocky Mountain region of the United States, dedicated to educating the community through the collection, preservation, interpretation and exhibition of the diverse arts and cultures of the Americas, from ancient to modern. contemporary, through innovative exhibitions and programming.
For more information you can visit the museum’s website: http://museo.org
