ntslive.co.uk/shows/raga-vibrations/episodes/raga-vibrations-friday-5th-june

"Raga Vibrations" is a monthly selection of Indian music curated by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma & Greg Davis.

Raga Vibrations - 5th June 2020

In this first episode, Ivan interviews Chicago's own Errol Ortiz about his experiences growing up in Chicago in the 60s and being around the Chicago Imagists, finding your style and sticking with it, and how comic books, military airplanes and his love of color influenced his creative process.

The LatinXAmerican Podcast is a partnership between DePaul Art Museum and Archives + Futures. This series accompanies the exhibition LatinXAmerican at DePaul Art Museum on view from January 7 to August 15 featuring 38 Latinx artists from Chicago and beyond. In this series we will be talking with ten artists that have work in this show and each episode will be released every other Friday. The DPAM LatinXAmerican exhibition and its accompanying programs like this one are being provided through the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

S02EP01 - The LatinXAmerican: Errol Ortiz

Archives + Futures (A+F) is a podcast series developed by Ivan LOZANO. Currently in its first season, A+F is generating an archive of interviews and conversations for current and future visual artists to connect to the personal practices and cultural histories, cannons, heroes and ancestors of their fellow Latinx and Indigenous artists of the Americas.

The podcast took shape in early 2018 after the publication of a review for Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly, a show that included Ivan, as well as a number of other Latinx and Indigenous artists of the Americas (including Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, who was one of the co-hosts during the “pilot season”). While this review wasn’t technically “bad,” the writer ignored a majority of the themes and concepts being explored in the show, which all relate to how abstraction is expressed through our identities and points of view as artists of color. We realized this is a common experience: white writers, curators, gallerists, etc are often unable (we’d like to be optimistic and avoid using the harsher “unwilling”) to properly educate themselves on cultural differences that help our work bloom, instead choosing to center whiteness as the primary focal point for interpretation and critique. This whitewashing of our cultural production recalls Linda Nochlin’s essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” of 1971 – perhaps the problem is the institution, the society we live in, the educational system and the many systemic blocks and hurdles we artists of color must overcome to be considered in the running.

A+F wants to help artists break that cycle by providing opportunities for Latinx and Indigenous artists of the Americas to talk to each other and create feedback loops that bypass whiteness as a center. A secondary, but equally important mission, is the archiving impulse behind the project. Our histories are often kept out of official records, made invisible by systems that don’t recognize our achievements. Therefore, it is vitally important for us to create our own records, our own histories and archives, and to make them available to researchers and future generations. We want to create the foundations for their future successes to be built upon.

S02EP01 - The LatinXAmerican: Errol Ortiz

Archives + Futures

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