New Traditions: Identifying, Expressing & Marketing Yourself as an
IMMIGRANT ARTIST IN NEW YORK

New York Foundation for the Arts at El Museo del Barrio
Wednesday, April 21, 6:30 - 8:30 pm

NYFA's Immigrant Artist Project celebrates Immigrant Heritage Week, 2010 with a panel discussion exploring New York City as a nexus of both human migration and artistic practice, investigating how immigrant artists bridge the distinction between contemporary and traditional art when speaking about, conceiving of, and marketing their work.

Moderator:
Sara Reisman Independent Curator and Director, Percent for Art, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs

Speakers:
Hitomi Iwasaki Curator and Director of Exhibitions, Queens Museum of Art
Amelia Uzategui Bonilla Peruvian-born dancer, performer and educator
Cui Fei Chinese-born visual artist
Nicolas Dumit Estevez Dominican-born performance artist and public interventionist



Bios:
Amelia Uzategui Bonilla is a Peruvian-American dancer and teaching artist based in New York City. She currently reperforms the works of Marina Abramović at the Museum of Modern Art and teaches dance to first graders at PS 43. Her choreographies have been presented in NYC at AUNTS, the Bushwick SITE Festival, and the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Independantly, she also teaches and performs in Peru. NYC performing credits include The Metropolitan Opera Ballet, Calpulli Mexican Dance Company, the Sulayman Al Bassan Theatre Company, and Tino Sehgal. Amelia is an alumnus of Juilliard's Dance Division, where she graduated with Scholastic Distinction and was awarded the Inter-Arts Award for leadership in educational outreach. She has completed fellowships with Mark DeGarmo & Dancers (teacher training) and NYU's Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (EMERGENYC). In June 2010, she is headed to Croatia, to perform and tour with Sodaberg, a dance collective based in Zagreb.

Nicolas Dumit Estevez is an artist working in performance art, public interventions and art in everyday life. Born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, he lives and works in the South Bronx. He has exhibited extensively in the US as well as internationally at venues such as Madrid Abierto/ARCO, The IX Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05 and 07, the Bulgarian Biennial, Prague Quadrennial, The Queens Museum of Art, P.S.1/MoMA Clocktower Gallery, Longwood Arts Gallery/BCA, El Museo del Barrio, The Center for Book Arts, The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Franklin Furnace, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. He teaches at the Transart Institute in Berlin, Germany. In 2010 Estevez will be symbolically baptized as a Bronxite in the waters of the Bronx River as part of Born Again, a public intervention developed for Longwood Arts Project/Bronx Council of the Arts.

Cui Fei was born in Jinan, China. She received her MFA in painting at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and received her BFA degree from the China Academy of Fine Arts. Cui’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as the Museum of Chinese in American, NY; Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY; Kunstgewerbe Museum, Dresden, Germany; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE; Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA; New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; Chelsea Art Museum, NY; Wave Hill, Bronx, NY; and Bronx Museum of Arts, among others. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the New York Foundation for the Arts Artist’s Fellowship, and the Excellence in Arts Award from Bronx Council on the Arts. She was selected into the Emerge Program, Aljira & Creative Capital, Newark, NJ; and the AIM program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Princeton University Art Museum; The Tang Center for East Asian Art at Princeton University.

Hitomi Iwasaki is the Director of Exhibitions at Queens Museum of Art (QMA). She has been a member of the Museum’s curatorial staff since 1996. She has organized a number of group exhibitions of emerging artists including two of the past Queens International biennial exhibits in 2002 and 2004 and numerous solo and group project exhibitions with emerging and mid-career artists including Patty Chang, Silvia Grunner, Luca Buvoli, Nic Hess, Christian Marclay, Sara Oppenheimer, Lisa Sigal, Carlos Amorarles, and Ester Pertigas among many others. Hitomi is initiating Launch Pad, the QMA’s first artist-in-residence program with O Zhang, Johanna Unzueta, Duke Riley and Daniel Bozhkov, and others. Hitomi was born and raised in Kyoto, Japan and moved to New York in 1989. She received her undergraduate degree in Visual Communication Theory and Art History at Kyoto Seika University, MA in Museum Studies from New York University and Graduate Studies in Art History from City College of the City University of New York.

Sara Reisman is Director of Percent for Art at the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs where she oversees the City of New York’s permanent public art commissioning program. As an independent curator, Reisman has curated exhibitions in New York City and elsewhere that have focused on public and social practice, site-specificity, and modes of cultural and political identification. Recent exhibitions include The Arbitrariness of Signs at Momenta Gallery in Brooklyn and E10: Emerge at Aljira, a center for contemporary art in Newark, New Jersey (both 2010); Committed Explanations in Geography, a solo exhibition by Pablo Helguera at the Houghton Gallery at the Cooper Union (both 2009); Landscape as Litmus at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Republic of Srbska, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Stalin by Picasso or Portrait of Woman with Moustache at The Cooper Union School of Art, and Ethnographies of the Future at Rotunda Gallery (all 2008) and Float at Socrates Sculpture Park (2007, 2005, and 2003).

Reisman was a 2002-2003 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and earned her BA at the University of Chicago where she studied linguistics and Near Eastern languages. In 2004-2005 Reisman was the Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art, at the University of Pennsylvania where she taught Contemporary Art and the Art of Curating and organized the exhibition Soft Sites at the ICA and Bartram's Garden in Southwest Philadelphia. The following year she was the 2005-2006 Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo Curatorial Fellow at the New Museum of Contemporary Art where she contributed research and writing for the museum's opening exhibition Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century. Prior to her current position at Percent for Art, Reisman was Associate Dean of the School of Art at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and Curatorial Consultant for Public Art at the Queens Museum of Art where she organized The Center of Everywhere, an exhibition of four community-based public art projects by Mike Estabrook, Lin+Lam, Miguel Luciano, and vydavy sindikat.