Taller Puertorriqueño is proud to present Another World Exists, new work by the New York City-based artist Marina Gutierrez. Gutierrez is a multidisciplinary artist who works in drawing, sculpture, performance, and installation. Her work is often community-based, conceptual, and interweaves historical events. With COVID 19 as a backdrop, her current work contends with the idea of connection and inspiration. She does this by examining her relationships and the conditions of her environment. The exhibition also brings together rarely seen early work.
With her 2021 drawing, We in Water 1 (Drawing for distraction & to feel closer to everyone missed), a work in graphite and colored pencil, she created a heroic ode to friends, family, and students who she had not seen due to the pandemic and death, and whom she couldn’t see as before. These she depicts as she has experienced them: as a winged Buddhist avenging angel, her late mom is drinking tea, the children waiting to paddle in the canoe, and wearing the aura of a vejigante mask by the yellow canoe, Gutierrez herself.
Amidst the energy of Black Lives Matter protests, Reliquary for Elinor Bumpurs & Deborah Danner (2021), a paper-maché and mix-media sculpture, looks back to 1984 when this 66-year old woman died at the hands of police. The piece came about after Gutierrez read Deborah Danner’s essay about her struggles with mental health and who referenced Elinor Bumpers’ history. Subsequently, in 2016 Deborah Danner too died under similar conditions.
Marina Gutierrez is an artist who combines community-based work, public, and studio arts. She was also the director of Cooper Unionâs Saturday Program for nearly four decades, serving over ten thousand NYC young people, encouraging many to enter the Arts. She has exhibited widely and in pivotal exhibitions such as CARIBBEAN: Crossroads of the World at the Queens Museum (N.Y.C.), Kréyol Factory at Parc de la Villette (Paris), at El Museo del Barrio (N.Y.C.), and created a solo installation at Project Row Houses (Houston, Texas). She is the recipient of Joan Mitchel, N.Y.F.A. and Mid-Atlantic Fellowships, L.M.C.C.’s Swing Space, Governors Island residency, and two N.Y.C. Arts Commission Design Awards for public projects in East Harlem’s De Burgos Center and Prospect Park’s Imagination Playground. Gutierrez is also co-author of “ART/ VISION / VOICE Cultural” published in 2005 by âColumbia College/Maryland Institute of Art.
anotherworldexists, #heroic_odes, #ode_to_friend
Curator: Rafael Damast
This exhibition and its program is made possible through generous funding from
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Philadelphia Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, PNC Arts Alive, and The Joseph Robert Foundation
