In celebration of the exhibition Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe, an evening with the artist and some of her closest colleagues and friends: artists Candida Alvarez and William Villalongo and curator Lowery Stokes Sims. All four panelists have worked together in various configurations for many years, and will reflect on the importance of intergenerational collaboration, teaching, and mentorship to their practices. The panel discussion will be moderated by Alexandra Schwartz, MAD’s curator of modern & contemporary art, design, & craft.
About the Panelists
Candida Alvarez is widely regarded as one of her generation's most highly innovative and experimental painters. She makes paintings and drawings that blur the boundaries between the conceptual, the intuitive and the abstract. Complex and vibrantly layered with color and shapes built from combinations of abstract and figurative forms rich in memory, painting history and references to everyday life. Her work has been collected by the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Whitney Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Addison Gallery of American Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, among others.
Lowery Stokes Sims served on the education and curatorial staff of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1972-99), as executive director and president The Studio Museum in Harlem (2000-2007) and is now retired as Curator Emerita from the Museum of Arts and Design (2007-2015). Over the last few years, Sims has been an independent curator and consultant for the Caribbean Cultural Center, the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Craft Contemporary, Grounds for Sculpture, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Center for Art, Design & Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She was Visiting Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (2018-2020) and the 2021-22 Kress-Beinecke Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
William Villalongo lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He was born in 1975 in Hollywood, FL and raised in the town of Bridgeton, NJ. Villalongo's creative output involves studio practice, writing, and curatorial projects. His figurative paintings, works on paper and sculpture are concerned with representing the Black subject against notions of race and explore metaphors for mythology, wayfinding ,and liberation. Critically acclaimed curatorial projects such as American Beauty at Susan Inglett Gallery in 2013 and Black Pulp! touring nationally between 2016-2018 explore the intersections of politics, history and art. Villalongo is the recipient of the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptor's Grant. His work is included in several notable collections including the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Princeton University Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio ,and Denver Art Museum. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Villalongo attended the American Academy in Rome as the 2022 Jules Guerin & Harold M. English Rome Prize Fellow in Visual Art. The artist is represented by Susan Inglett Gallery, New York and is an Associate Professor at The Cooper Union School of Art.
