Sharing the Spotlight: Mercedes Trelles in conversation with Maximo Rafael Colón
When: Saturday, November 16, 2:00 - 4:00 pm
Where: Teatro LATEA @ The Clemente
Sharing the Spotlight is presented with support from Historias, a multi-year programmatic initiative led by The Clemente in partnership with LxNY and supported by the Rauschenberg Foundation. Historias charts the transformative impact of Latinx communities in NYC through research, artistic interpretations, and public engagement.
Teatro LATEA and Historias are pleased to co-present Sharing the Spotlight, a conversation series by emerging Latinx artists/photographers to run in tandem with the Borimix exhibition Maximo Rafael Colón: Storied Lens. For this series, Colón has extended an invitation to a select group of Latino photographers to share the spotlight in a series of artist talks where they will present and discuss their work.
This event will be the first talk of the series, an in-depth interactive conversation between Storied Lens co-curator, Mercedes Trelles (University of Puerto Rico), and exhibiting artist, Maximo Rafael Colón. They will discuss Colón’s photo practice, his trajectory, the selection of photographs in Storied Lens and upcoming projects.
About the participants:
Mercedes Trelles Hernández is a professor of art history at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus, and an independent curator. She has written art criticism and edited several catalogues on the history of art in Puerto Rico. In 2015 she collaborated with Tate Modern, contributing an essay on Argentinean pop for The World Goes Pop. After spending three years as curator of the collection of the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, she has organized several independent exhibitions. She directed the Francisco Oller gallery from 2014 to 2018.
Maximo Rafael Colón was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Colón is a New York based photographer who studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Colón's photography speaks to his concerns of social justice, activism, and cultural expression which encapsulates a wide range of interest in music, the human condition and making visible the people of our society who are often marginalized through discrimination and inequality. His primary medium is analogue photography, Colón also creates assemblages in the found object tradition. His works have been exhibited in several venues throughout New York City and Puerto Rico and a number of his photographs form part of the Centro De EstudiosPuertorriqueños archives at CUNY Hunter College and of the permanent collection at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
In 2015, Colón's photography was prominently featured in ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, and The Loisaida Center in Manhattan. Some of his photographs form part of the Centro De EstudiosPuertorriqueños archives at the City University of New York's Hunter College and his work has also been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York, Bronx Documentary Center, New York Cultural Center and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. He is currently editing My Upside Down World: Deconstructing Photography, a five year digital project encompassing photographs from New York, Puerto Rico, Berlin, Mainz, Paris, Havana, and Toronto His works can be found in numerous publications, film documentaries and are part of many private collections.