In the Studio: Karen Lofgren and Vicente Telles

Artists Karen Lofgren and Vicente Telles will discuss their work and artistic practice with Edward J. Sullivan, the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the History of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts and College of Arts and Sciences, New York University and co-curator of our current exhibition, El Dorado: Myths of Gold Part II.

Join us on Wednesday, February 21, at 5 pm ET live on Instagram from your cell phone, or watch on YouTube after, for a series of remote visits to artists' studios to bring Americas Society's Visual Arts public programs to your home. Check out the series playlist.

Speakers 

Karen Lofgren is a Los Angeles-based, Canadian visual artist, whose feminist and decolonial research centers on the living world: ritual, history, medicine, and how our cultural systems connect to other wild systems. Her first monograph: emBRUJAda: Charms for the Living was published by Set Margins’ press in 2023. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, 2019 Pollock-Krasner Grantee, was Fulbright Core Scholar at UAL, Central St. Martins College in 2017/2018, and is currently supported by a grant from Canada Council for the Arts. She has shown work at Palm Springs Art Museum; High Desert Test Sites; LACMA; Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz; LACE; Priska Pasquer; Royale Projects; and Commonwealth & Council. 

Vicente Telles is a Santero (painter of saints) and Cultural Iconographer who is driven by the desire to honor the culture and traditions of his native New Mexico. He began painting traditional retablos (saints on carved wood) using natural pigments created from clays and minerals on homemade gesso, which is then sealed with pinon sap varnish. 

Always looking for ways to push boundaries, his style has evolved to include various reinterpretations of traditional Catholic and Cultural iconography. His experimentation with different mediums such as textiles, high quality paper(s), found and repurposed materials are used to create more contemporary pieces. 

To Telles, being a Santero and Cultural Iconographer is so much more than painting; “being a Santero and Cultural Iconographer means being a teacher, a student, and an observer of tradition and maker of the contemporary.” In this way, his Santos and contemporary pieces transcend religion, allowing Telles to do his part to keep his heritage and centuries of tradition alive and vibrant. 

Telles’ work can be found in private and public collections both in the United States and abroad.

Moderator 

Edward J Sullivan is the Helen Gould Shepard professor in the History of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts and College of Arts and Sciences, New York University. A prominent scholar and curator in the field of modern and contemporary Latin American and Caribbean art, Sullivan is the author of numerous books and exhibition catalogs in this area. Among his publications are the books Making the Americas Modern: Hemispheric Art 1910–1960, From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of Impressionism, and The Language of Objects in the Art of the Americas. He recently curated the 2019 exhibition Brazilian Modern: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx at the New York Botanical Garden and the 2018 exhibition Processing: Paintings and Prints by Roberto Juarez at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, Colorado.

Visit the Americas Society Visual Arts YouTube Channel for recordings of In the Studio Series and other previous events. 

Follow the conversation on Instagram: #IntheStudioAS | @artamericassociety

 More digital content from Visual Arts at Americas Society:

• Check out the current exhibition: El Dorado: Myths of Gold Part II
• Check out the current iteration of our Flag Series: Luis Romero, El Dorado (2023) 
• Read about the previous exhibition: Sylvia Palacios Whitman: To Draw a Line with the Body 
• Read the exhibition catalog for This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975
• Watch videos of recent events: 
  • Performance of Seba Calfuqueo's Cu-tter
  • Performance of Sylvia Palacios Whitman’s Leaf 
  • Performance of Rosario Zorraquín’s Compression—Oruguismo

In the Studio series 

Check out previous conversations with artists bringing us to their virtual studios.