CARA's 2023 Fall Feast

Javier Téllez is a New York based artist born in Venezuela. His work reflects a sustained interest in bringing peripheral communities and invisible situations to the fore of contemporary art addressing disabilities and mental illness as marginalizing conditions. Tellez’s projects have often involved working in collaboration with people diagnosed with mental illness to produce film installations that question the notions of the normal and the pathological.

Téllez has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Thurgau Kunstmuseum, Warth, Switzerland (2022); Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2018); the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester (2018); the Blanton Museum, Austin; the San Francisco Art Institute (2014); Kunsthaus Zürich (2014); SMAK, Ghent (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2011); Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2005); and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2004). He has participated in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Long Island City; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Castello di Rivoli, Torino; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; ICA, Boston; and Renaissance Society, Chicago, as well as Aichi Triennial (2019); dOCUMENTA, Kassel, Germany (2012); Manifesta, Trento, Italy; Sydney Biennial; and the Whitney Biennial, New York (all 2008); Venice Biennale (2001 and 2003); and Yokohama Triennial (2001). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999, and in 2016 the Global Mental Health Award for Innovation in the Arts from Columbia University, New York.

Marilyn Nance has produced images of unique moments in the cultural history of the US and the African Diaspora. While serving as the photographer for the US delegation of FESTAC ’77, Nance made one of the most comprehensive photographic accounts of this landmark Pan African festival of arts and culture. Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos published in 2022 is a focused study of Nance through an archival encounter with her documentation FESTAC.

Nance is a two-time finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Award in Humanistic Photography. Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Library of Congress, and has been published in The World History of Photography, History of Women in Photography and The Black Photographers Annual. She lives in New York.

MC
Alexandra Swe Wagner

Alexandra Swe Wagner is the host of Alex Wagner Tonight, which airs Tuesday to Friday at 9pm on MSNBC. Prior to this, she was a co-host and executive producer of “The Circus,” Showtime’s Emmy-nominated weekly documentary series chronicling American politics. She was a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and is the author of Futureface, a critically-acclaimed memoir about identity and immigration.

Wagner is a former special correspondent with CBS News and co-host of CBS This Morning: Saturday. Prior to this, she was the host of the Emmy-nominated NOW with Alex Wagner on MSNBC. She was a reporter with the Huffington Post, where she covered innovation and the American economy, and also served as the White House Correspondent for AOL’s Politics Daily.

Wagner has hosted several podcasts, including Crooked Media’s Six Feet Apart, a limited-run series about the pandemic, as well as Podcast for America, Slate’s weekly political podcast, which she co-hosted with journalists Mark Leibovich and Annie Lowrey.

Earlier, Wagner was the executive director of Not on Our Watch, a grant-making and advocacy non-profit created to stop mass atrocities. Before that, she spent four years as the editor-in-chief of The Fader magazine, covering music and culture around the world.

Wagner attended Brown University and lives in New York City with her family.

Toasts
Robin D.G. Kelley
Matt Mullican

Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US History at UCLA. He is author or co-editor of numerous award-winning books, including Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America, and Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, among others.

Since the 1970s, Matt Mullican’s multi-media artistic practice has been concerned with signification, representation and knowledge systems. Mullican investigates how signifying processes function and how objects become charged with meaning. This has led him to establish his own subjective 5-part classification system, which he calls his “theory of the five worlds”. In this cosmology, each color corresponds to different levels of perception: green stands for material, blue for the everyday world, yellow for ideas, white and black for language and red for the subjective. This non-verbal language system of signs and pictograms is the common thread throughout his work, which ranges in media across painting, sculpture, drawing and photography, to film, neon, stained glass works, rubbings, installation and also performance.

The Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) is an arts nonprofit, research center, and publisher that aims to expand public discourses and historical records to reflect art’s abundant pasts, presents, and futures. Through initiatives including publishing, exhibitions, public programs, and fellowships, we seek to challenge dominant narratives and amplify the breadth of arts and culture.

Mariana Castillo Deball
Jane Hait, Chair
Matt Keegan
Shahed Fakhari Larson
Andrew Marks, Treasurer
Howard Marks
Miko McGinty
Sherally Munshi
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
Schuster Tanger
Kelly Taxter
Julia Trotta
Helen Warwick