In the Studio: Sofía Gallisá Muriente

Join us live on Instagram from your cell phone, or watch here and on YouTube after, for a series of remote visits to artists' studios to bring Americas Society's Visual Arts public programs to your home. Every Wednesday and Friday this month, contemporary artists will dialogue with Director and Chief Curator of Visual Arts Aimé Iglesias Lukin about their work and practice.

About the artist:

Sofía Gallisá Muriente (b. 1986, San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a visual artist working mainly with video, film, photography and text, mining contemporary cultural institutions and historical sites for evidence of contested and/or contradictory narratives. She earned a BFA in Film at New York University (2008) and has participated in experimental pedagogical platforms led by artists, like Anhoek School, led by Mary Walling Blackburn, and Beta-Local's La Práctica in Puerto Rico. Through multiple approaches to documentation, her work deepens the subjectivity of historical narratives, examining formal and informal archives, popular imaginaries and oral history. In 2015, she was awarded an emerging artist grant from TEOR/éTica in Costa Rica, where she had a solo show titled Buscando La Sombra. She has been a resident artist at Museo La Ene in Argentina (2012), Alice Yard in Trinidad & Tobago (2017), Solar (2017) and Oficina para la Acción Urbana (2018) in Tenerife; as well as a Flaherty Seminar fellow. Her work has been featured in Art in America, Terremoto, Hyperallergic and other publications. She has also shown in the Whitney Biennial (2019), San Juan Polygraphic Triennial; at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires, ifa Galerie in Berlin, the Getty’s PST: LA/LA in California and El Dorado in Bogotá, Colombia.

She recently finished a 6-year tenure as co-director of Beta-Local, an artist-run, non-profit organization dedicated to fostering knowledge exchange and transdisciplinary practices in Puerto Rico. The Covid19 outbreak has indefinitely postponed her upcoming Smithsonian Artist Fellowship, an exhibition at TEA in Tenerife, and a commission with fellow Puerto Rican artist Natalia Lassalle for an exhibition at the USF Contemporary Art Museum.

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

More digital content from Visual Arts at Americas Society:

• Read the exhibition catalogue for Feliciano Centurión: Abrigo.
• Watch the documentary Feliciano Centurión: Abrazo Íntimo al Natural, directed by Mon Ross (2016).
• Watch recent events videos:
  • Curator's Perspective – Jacopo Crivelli Visconti
  • "I Am Reborn at Every Moment" – Contemporary Reflections on Feliciano Centurión and AIDS
  • Ulises Carrión – Art, Mail, Books, and So…
  • Book Launch: Alejandra Seeber – Picture This Featuring the Artist in Conversation with Guillermo Kuitca

Image caption: Sofía Gallisá Muriente. Photo by Néstor Delgado Morales.