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Nanette Shaw
Three artists whose work focuses on the multicultural and multiethnic face of New York will be featured in an exhibition to be shown during the CUNY Graduate Center’s April 3 to 7 celebration of its new campus in the former B. Altman Building. Urban Renewal: Afro-Caribbean Art and Artists in New York City will feature photographs and other works on paper by the artists Terry Boddie, Luanda Lozano, and Rejin Leys and is curated by Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, a doctoral candidate in art history at The Graduate Center. Sponsored by the Doctoral Students’ Council, a student organization at The Graduate Center, the exhibition can be seen all week from 12 noon to 7 p.m. daily in Room 5414 of The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue. There will be an opening reception on April 3 at 6 pm. The exhibition, which is one of dozens of events during The Graduate Center’s new campus celebration, will be free and open to the public. According to the exhibitions’s organizers, Urban Renewal: Afro-Caribbean Art and Artists in New York City "seeks to reflect the constantly changing face of CUNY as we move into the new millennium" and will "serve to illuminate how specific aesthetic responses to living in New York City as part of a growing multi-ethnic population are evident in contemporary art." Rejin Leys is a mixed media and book artist whose work has been exhibited in museums and galleries nationally as well as in Haiti and Canada. Her current work combines drawing, collage and printmaking, and draws on her awareness of social and political issues, and how those issues impact her community. She was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 1995 and her work has been reviewed in such publications as Art Nexus, The New York Times, The Miami Herald, and Le Nouvelliste. Leys is a graduate of the Parsons School of Design, and is currently enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at Brooklyn College. Terry Boddie was born in Nevis, Eastern Caribbean, in 1965. His work has been exhibited in and around the New York metropolitan area as well as elsewhere, including the Wunsch Arts Center in Glen Cove, the Aljira Contemporary Arts Center in Newark, Ohio University, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Boddie earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in photography from New York University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Hunter College. His work has been reviewed by The New York Times, The Record Review, Caribbean Life and other publications. His works are in the collection of the Schomburg Museum in Manhattan as well as several private collections. In 1998, Boddie received an AIM Fellowship from the Bronx Museum of the Arts and an En Foco New Works Award. He is a 1999/2000 Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Luanda Luano’s prints are in the collection of Bob Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop where she has been working as a printmaker since 1993. She has participated in national and international group exhibitions and has also been an invited artist at the International Printmaking Biennial. Currently, she is teaching Drawing and Mixed Media at the Bronx River Art Center; she also has been teaching art classes at Pelham Art Center in New York. Curator Rocío Aranda-Alvarado is a doctoral candidate in Art History at The CUNY Graduate Center. She is currently working on a chronicle of the life of the American artist Romare Bearden. Her dissertation is a comparative examination of avant-garde movements in the visual arts in Harlem and Havana. She previously co-curated the exhibition Family, Fission and Fusion: Hispaniola at Imarisha Art House in Brooklyn. The Graduate Center is the doctorate-granting institution of The City University of New York. It offers 31 doctoral programs and seven master's degree programs in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, and also houses 24 research centers and institutes and administers the CUNY Baccalaureate Program. According to a recent National Research Council report, more than a third of The Graduate Center’s rated programs rank among the nation's top 20 at public and private institutions, nearly a quarter are among the top ten when compared to publicly supported institutions alone, and more than half are among the top five programs at publicly supported institutions in the northeast. Further information on The Graduate Center's programs and activities can be found on its Web site at: www.gc.cuny.edu. |