The conversations archived below took place between curator, Lesley A. Wolff, and artists involved in The Kingdom of This World, Reimagined, during the Summer of 2021.
Artist conversations are archived alphabetically by artist last name.
Dudley Alexis
Dudley Alexis (b. 1984, Haiti) is a visual artist and an independent filmmaker based in Miami, Florida. In both his visual art and filmmaking Alexis aims to understand the power of thought and how it helps to translate our voices. Through his work he wishes to encourage people to expand their consciousness, challenge their thinking and express their voices. His previous work includes short film, post-production for Miccosukee Magazine, which showcased the life of the Miccosukee Tribe of Florida and other local South Florida issues, and the feature-length documentary, Liberty in a Soup (2016), inspired by the national dish of Haiti, Soup Joumou. Most recently, Alexis was Producer/Director of the documentary When Liberty Burns (2020), an in-depth analysis on the 40th anniversary of the life and untimely death of Arthur Lee McDuffie at the hands of Miami Dade police officers.
Chesley Antoinette
Chesley Antoinette (b. 1985, USA) is a native Texan, born and raised in Austin where she discovered the process of making art at the local community college. Later, she transferred to Stephen F. Austin University in Nacogdoches with a B.F.A in Sculpture and completed her formal education in Denton at the University of North Texas with an M.F.A in Fiber Arts. She currently splits her time between Austin and Dallas as an educator and practicing artist. She is the creator and designer of Cantoinette Studios, conceptualizing with sustainable practices in forms of sculptural installations, wearable art, and curatorial projects. Her current body of work explores 18th century North America through turban headwraps and shares the history in forms of art exhibitions and interactive educational workshops. Chesley remains passionate towards supporting, sharing, and building an appreciation for the arts with Texas and all of humankind.
José Bedia
José Bedia (b. 1959, Cuba) is an internationally renowned, Cuban-born visual artist based in Miami, Florida. Trained in Cuba at the famed San Alejandro Academy, Bedia’s early career involved the radical transformation of Cuban art of the Generación de los 80, ushered in by the groundbreaking exhibition Volumen I. Today, Bedia’s work merges tribal and ethnographic interests using a field work approach and adding layered socio-historical elements from various world traditions. This vast knowledge has marked his work and shows how this cultural heritage has influenced our daily lives. Thanks to this solid work, characterized by the mix of “storytelling” that he calls informative lessons about the cosmogonic Universes of the ancestral cultures and the influence in popular cultures, his work has been exhibited in La Habana, Sao Paulo, Venice and Beijing Biennales, where he has received myriad awards and acclamations. Bedia’s work appears in collections across the globe, including el Museo Nacional Palacio de Bellas Artes (Havana), MoMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim, Tate Modern, Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Colección Daros (Zurich), MEIAC, DA2, IVAM, CAAM (Spain), MOCA and PAMM (Miami).
Edouard Duval-Carrié
Edouard Duval-Carrié (b. 1954, Haiti) is an internationally renowned artist and curator based in Miami, Florida. His family emigrated to Puerto Rico while he was a child during the François Duvalier regime. Duval-Carrié studied at the Université de Montréal and McGill University in Canada before graduating with a Bachelor of Arts from Loyola College, Montréal in 1978. He later attended the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, from 1988 to 1989. He resided in France for many years before relocating to Miami, Florida, where he lives and works today. His works reside in the permanent collections of institutions such as The Detroit Institute of Arts; Musée des Art Africains et Oceaniens; Davenport Museum of Art, Perez Art Museum Miami, Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien; and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, among others. In 2016 he was the recipient of the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Consul General of France. In 2018 he was awarded the Michael Richards award, and in 2019 he completed a major sculptural commission for the new Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, Senegal.
Scherezade García
Scherezade García (b. 1966, Dominican Republic) is a painter, printmaker, and installation artist whose work often explores allegories of history, migration, collective and ancestral memory, and cultural colonization and politics. A co-founder of the Dominican York Proyecto GRÁFICA, she holds an AAS from Altos de Chavón School of Design, a BFA from Parsons School of Design | The New School, and an MFA from The City College of New York, CUNY. García has been featured in solo and duo exhibitions at the Art Museum of the Americas, Clifford Art Gallery at Colgate University, Miller Theater at Columbia University, Lehman College Art Gallery, Crossroads Gallery at the University of Notre Dame, Museo de Arte de Santo Domingo and others. She has participated in the Havana Biennial, the International Biennial of Paintings at Haute de Cagnes, the IV Caribbean Biennial, Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan, Latin American Biennial, BRIC Biennial, Venice Autonomous Biennial, and international fairs. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Museum of the Americas, El Museo del Barrio, The Housatonic Museum of Art, El Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo, and others. García is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2015) and the Colene Brown Art Prize (2020). An edited monograph on her work Scherezade García: From This Side of the Atlantic, was published in 2020 by the Art Museum of the Americas. Her artist's papers can be found at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
José García Cordero
José García Cordero (b. 1951, Dominican Republic) is a visual artist based in Paris. His work considers the dualities of his transatlantic experience and is informed in equal measure by visual artists and authors from Latin America. He studied painting with the Dominican Master Hernández Ortega. In 1977, fleeing Balaguer's dictatorship, he moved to Paris in a voluntary exile, where he studied Contemporary History in the University of Vincennes. Dividing his time between Dominican Republic (Santo Domingo and Cabarete) and Paris, France, García Cordero creates large-scale, "double entendre" paintings that reflect both the duality of his personal experience and the conflicts between European and Caribbean culture. Also an eloquent poet/philosopher, this Dominican Republic native is inspired by Latin American authors as much as by visual artists. His works have been exhibited in group and solo shows in galleries, museums, art fairs, and institutions in Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. His latest solo exhibition, Opera Nera:30 años de trabajos en blanco y negro recently opened at the Lyle Reitzel Gallery with an accompanying exhibition catalogue surveying the artist’s career. Additionally, García Cordero is a participant in the 2021 Santo Domingo Bienal and his work has been newly acquired by the French government for exhibition in Caribe Contemporáneo 2021, in Martinique.
Click here for transcript of interview:
Leah Gordon
Leah Gordon (b. 1959, England) is a photographer, film-maker, curator, collector and writer. In the 1980's she wrote lyrics, sang and played for the feminist folk punk band, 'The Doonicans'. Leah makes work on Modernism and architecture; the slave trade and industrialization; and grassroots religious, class and folk histories. Gordon’s film and photographic work has been exhibited internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Dak’art Biennale; the National Portrait Gallery, UK and the Norton Museum of Art, Florida as well as broadcast on Channel 4, Arte and PBS. Her photography book Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti was published in June 2010. She is the co-director of the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; was a curator for the Haitian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale; was the co-curator of ‘Kafou: Haiti, History & Art’ at Nottingham Contemporary, UK; on the curatorial team for ‘In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st Century Haitian Art’ at the Fowler Museum, UCLA and was the co-curator of 'PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince' at Pioneer Works, NYC in 2018 and MOCA, Miami in 2019. In 2015 Leah Gordon was the recipient of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Travel Award for Central America and the Caribbean.
Roberto Juárez
Robero Juárez (b. 1952, USA) is an American visual artist known for his paintings, printmaking and large scale mixed-media works. His work has been exhibited throughout North America, Europe and China and can be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Perez Art Museum Miami. Large scale projects include commissions for the Miami International Airport, Grand Central Terminal and the Alto Lee Adams US Courthouse. In 1997 Juárez was awarded the Prix de Rome. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2002, a National Academy of Design Academician in 2012 and a Civitella Ranieri Fellow in 2021. Surveys of his work include “A Sense of Place” in 2003 at MOCANOMI and “Processing” at BMOCA in 2018. His most recent solo exhibition was “Ramona’s Front Yard” at Archive/Project Space.