EventsThe New Social Environment#819

Pacita Abad: Colors of My Dream

Featuring Pio Abad, Camille Hoffman, Emmy Catedral, and Jessamine Batario, with Lehua M. Taitano

Friday, May 26, 2023 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Leave a donation ✨🌈

Artists Pio Abad, Camille Hoffman, and Emmy Catedral join Rail contributor Jessamine Batario for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Lehua M. Taitano.

Pio Abad

A photo of Pio Abad on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Pio Abad is a London-based artist whose wide-ranging work mines alternative or repressed histories and offers counternarratives that draw out threads of complicity and entanglements between and within objects, incidents, ideologies, and people. Deeply informed by unfolding events in the Philippines, where the artist was born and raised, his work emanates from the personal and familial woven into the political and national. Abad has exhibited at the 58th Carnegie International; the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennial; Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila; and elsewhere. Abad’s works are part of a number of important collections including Tate, UK and Hawai’i State Art Museum, Honolulu. Abad is also the curator of the estate of his aunt, Filipino American artist Pacita Abad.

Camille Hoffman

A photo of Camille Hoffman on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Photo by Stephen Heraldo
Camille Hoffman’s practice is a ceremony of reconfiguration and critical reflection on the romantic American landscape. Considering the embedded and latent meanings around light, nature, the frontier, borders, race, gender and power in influential American landscape paintings, she uses materials collected from childhood and her everyday life to craft imaginary landscapes that are grounded in accumulation, personal narrative, and historical critique. Taking inspiration from the Philippine weaving and storytelling traditions of her ancestors, along with traditional landscape painting techniques from her academic training, she interweaves image with refuse to reveal seamless yet textured transcultural contradictions. She lives and works in New York City and teaches at The Cooper Union.

Emmy Catedral

A photo of Emmy Catedral on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Photo by Jocelyn Spaar
Emmy Catedral is a NY-based artist, writer, and educator whose installation, performance, texts, and collaborative acts of acentering have been presented under pseudo-institutional personas and as herself. Emmy was born in Butuan and raised in East Harlem and Queens, where she lives and tends to the NY-collection of the bi-coastal Pilipinx American Library. She has previously held positions at Distributed Art Publishers, and Printed Matter, and is currently Curator of Public Programs at the emergent Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), where she also oversees the selection and operations of the bookstore.

Jessamine Batario

A photo of Jessamine Batario on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Drawing by Phong Bui
Art historian Jessamine Batario specializes in modern and contemporary art. She received her PhD in Art History from The University of Texas at Austin. Batario currently lives in Waterville, Maine, where she is the Linde Family Foundation Curator of Academic Engagement at the Colby College Museum of Art. She was the guest critic for the Rail in March 2020.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

Dao Strom

A photo of Dao Strom on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨

Close

Home