UTEP Hosts Honduran Artist’s First U.S. Solo Museum Exhibition
Contemporary art exhibition examines historical relationships between Central America, U.S.
EL PASO, Texas (Jan 17, 2024) – The University of Texas at El Paso will host Honduran multidisciplinary artist Adán Vallecillo, whose work is found in collections across the globe — from New York’s Bronx Museum to the Daros Latinamerica Collection in Zürich, Switzerland —for the debut of his first solo museum exhibition in the United States.
“It is a privilege to host Adán and for his debut to be in El Paso, a community that is at the nexus of western and Latin American culture,” said Kerry Doyle, director of the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, which has a multi-year commitment to contemporary art from Central America. “The center’s ability to showcase an artist of Adán’s magnitude and renown speaks to the Rubin Center’s history of giving a voice to artists whose work challenges viewers to think deeply about society and the political and social mechanisms within which we live.”
The exhibition, titled Tiempo Libre, will have an opening reception with Vallecillo on Thursday, Jan. 25 at 5 p.m. in the Rubin Center. The event is open to the public; the exhibition will run through Saturday, April 20.
The display is a mid-career survey of the artist’s work from 2010 to the present. Trained in visual art and sociology, Vallecillo creates locally relevant and research-driven projects re-using found industrial materials to consider the cultural and social intersections between Central and South America with the U.S. and Europe.
Vallecillo also co-curated an exhibition titled Presentiments, which includes video and photographic work by 14 artists from Latin America with the Rubin Center’s curator, Laura Augusta, Ph.D. The exhibition considers the natural world, focusing on human and other-than-human relationships to make sense of national, geographic and emotional landscapes.
“Presentiments takes a uniquely Latin American sense of humor as a starting point. Many of the videos and photographs invite the surreal and humorous as points of entry for thinking about how we connect to each other and our environments,” said Vallecillo. “Curating the exhibition with Laura opened up deep conversations about how we describe influence and importance, but also how we make relationships with one another.”
Augusta added, "Adán's work has been at the forefront of Central American creative and political praxis for many years, as his extensive exhibition and curatorial histories demonstrate. I believe his work to offer a crucial perspective on the major environmental questions of our time, and his extensive on-the-ground research with communities offers an important example for our students of how a studio practice can also be profoundly engaged with the world around us."
About The University of Texas at El Paso
The University of Texas at El Paso is America’s leading Hispanic-serving university. Located at the westernmost tip of Texas, where three states and two countries converge along the Rio Grande, 84% of our 24,000 students are Hispanic, and more than half are the first in their families to go to college. UTEP offers 171 bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs at the only open-access, top-tier research university in America.
Last Updated on January 18, 2024 at 12:00 AM | Originally published January 18, 2024
By MC Staff UTEP Marketing and Communications
