Sean Nesselrode Moncada is Associate Professor in the Department of Theory and History of Art and Design at the Rhode Island School of Design. His research focuses on visual and material modernisms in the Americas and their contested socioecological dimensions, and his writing has appeared in several journals including Architectural Theory Review, Caiana: Revista de historia del arte y cultura visual del Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte, and Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas.
October 25, 2023
6:30 PM EDT
Register for the event
Join us for the launch of Sean Nesselrode Moncada’s book Refined Material: Petroculture and Modernity in Venezuela (August 2023), which explores the integral relationship between the global oil industry and the rise of geometric abstraction, kinetic art, and modern architecture in midcentury Venezuela. This event features introductions by Studies on Latin American Art series editor Alexander Alberro followed by a conversation with the author and artist Rolando Peña, whose work is featured in the publication.
The launch is open to the public and will take place in person at ISLAA, located at 142 Franklin Street in New York City. Attendees are encouraged to register online in advance. The conversation will be held in English, and a recording will be made available online following the event.
The University of California Press published Refined Material in August 2023 as part of the series Studies on Latin American Art. Books in the series encompass studies of art history and cultural practices emerging from Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the Latin American diaspora in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. International and cosmopolitan in scope, the series seeks to address the production, exhibition, and dissemination of art in and between countries and continents. This series is supported by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).
About The Speaker(s)
Sean Nesselrode Moncada
Rolando Peña
Rolando Peña is a conceptual artist whose work spans performance, happenings, installation, printmaking, film, and video. Since the 1980s, his practice has centered on crude oil, a symbol through which he has critiqued consumer society and oil exploitation. Peña has represented Venezuela at the London Biennial in 2002 and the Venice Biennale in 1997. Exhibitions of his work have been presented at Maria Baró Gallery, ARCOmadrid, Madrid (2020); Museum of Contemporary Art of North Miami, Miami (2016); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Sofía Imber, Caracas (1999); Museum of Fine Art, Caracas (1997); Maison de l’Amerique Latine, Paris (1986); and Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas (1985). Peña has received the Asociación Venezolana de Artistas Plásticos Armando Reveron Award (2012), a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2009), and a Creative Artists Public Service Program (CAPS) Fellowship (1981).
Alexander Alberro
Alexander Alberro is the Virginia Wright Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University where he teaches modern and contemporary European, US, and Latin American art, as well as the history of photography. His writings have been published in a broad range of journals and exhibition catalogues, and translated into numerous languages. He is also the author and editor of numerous books, including Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentieth Century Latin American Art (2017); Working Conditions: The Writings of Hans Haacke (2016); Luis Camnitzer in Conversation with Alexander Alberro (2014); What is Contemporary Art Today? (2012); John Miller: The Ruin of Exchange (2012); Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (2009); and Art After Conceptual Art (2006). Alberro is presently completing a book-length study, The Shape of Contemporary Art, that focuses on the transformation of the infrastructure of art in the new geography of globalization. He is the founding editor of the University of California Press’s book series Studies on Latin American Art, which commissions publications of art history and cultural practices emerging from Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the Latin American diaspora in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
