The New York Times Calls Americas Society's Palacios Whitman Exhibition "Unforgettable"

Want to see new art in the city? Check out Nachume Miller’s last paintings at David Benrimon Fine Art; Jaime Muñoz’s rebelling robots at François Ghebaly; and Sylvia Palacios Whitman’s unforgettable performances at Americas Society. […]

Sylvia Palacios Whitman

Simple, literal, and often quite funny, many of the drawings and performances in Sylvia Palacios Whitman’s exhibition To Draw a Line With the Body at Americas Society have been under the radar for decades. At a recent performance and discussion at Americas Society, Palacios admitted that she’d stopped making art for nearly 40 years. She is back now, though, in full force. 

Palacios moved to New York from her native Chile in the early 1960s and danced with Trisha Brown. Her early performances—the first ones were staged in Brown’s downtown studio—included absurd, deadpan movements, like picking up a group of performers with a crane in Green Bag (1975), moving them across the space and lowering them into a huge green bag made of fabric. In others, she inserted herself into a giant Slingshot (1975) or donned big green sculptural hands. Upon her return to making art, Palacios has been drawing, often illustrating episodes from her childhood, and doing performances explaining the drawings, which are almost like comedy routines. 

One thread running through her work is the everyday nature of art. Common materials like craft paper and cardboard are shaped into sculptures and exhibited on the floor. Anyone, in her estimation, can make art. At the Americas Society event, Palacios even encouraged an audience member who said they weren’t an artist to go home and make some art. “You never know!” Palacios exhorted. […]

Read the full article.