Podcast Conversation: The Supper Club: What Comes After?
Time: Saturday, December 4, 1pm
Location: Podcast Lounge
The Supper Club: What Comes After? centers on artist Elia Alba’s Supper Club, a multi-faceted art project that has brought together more than 50 contemporary artists of color from the United States through portraiture, food, and dialogue. Initiated in 2012, Alba began photographing contemporary visual artists of color in widely varied locations and forms of dress in order to reflect their unique artistic voices, embody their art and transform their identities into iconic, archetypal portraits. Combining the visual vocabulary of contemporary fashion photography and art history, Alba’s portraits underscore the interplay among persona, politics and aesthetics in much of contemporary art. In tandem with the portraits, Alba has hosted thematic dinner conversations which have brought together artists, scholars and performers of diverse diasporic cultures to examine race and culture in the United States, addressing issues of agency, race, the role of artists and audience. Both an exhibition and book published by Hirmer Verlag in 2019, The Supper Club serves as a critical historical archive of the last decade, documenting African Americans, Latin Americans, LatinX, Africans, South Asians, and Caribbean cultural producers in dialogue as they weigh in on the enduring power of art, food, and conversation in our everyday lives.
In the ten years since Alba began The Supper Club, the broader discourse around race and equity has changed dramatically, in light of both policing and the pandemic, resulting in a general shift in awareness nationally, as well as within the cultural sector. The Supper Club: What Comes After? considers how critical discourse about race has changed in the cultural sector, and how socially engaged projects like The Supper Club have changed in both meaning and impact, in light of heightened awareness of and activism against systemic racism.
Participants include: Elia Alba, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, and Sara Reisman.
Elia Alba is a multidisciplinary artist who works in photography, video, and sculpture. Her practice is concerned with the social and political complexity of race, representation, identity, and community. Alba received a BA from Hunter College in 1994 and completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001. She has exhibited at museums internationally, including The Studio Museum in Harlem; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Science Museum, London; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; El Museo del Barrio, New York; ITAU Cultural Institute, São Paulo; Matadero Madrid, National Museum of Art, Reina Sofía, Madrid and the 10th Havana Biennial. Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, and the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami. Alba’s work has been reviewed by Forbes, Artforum, ArtNews, and Cultured Magazine, among other publications. Her critically acclaimed book, Elia Alba, The Supper Club (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-supper-club-sara-reisman/1128344486) (Hirmer, 2019) brings together artists, scholars, and performers of diasporic cultures, through photography, food, and dialogue to examine race and culture in the US. She is artist-in-residence at the Andrew Freedman Home in The Bronx and was guest curator of El Museo del Barrio’s recent exhibition Estamos Bien: La Trienal 20/21. (https://www.elmuseo.org/la-trienal/)
Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose work has been recognized in 2021 with a Herb Alpert Award nomination, in 2018 by UCF Women of Distinction award, a 2017 UCF Luminary Award, a 2016 Franklin Furnace award, a 2016 USA Fellowship nomination, among others. Raimundi-Ortiz earned her MFA in 2008 at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of Art Ralph Bunche Fellow, and participated in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2002. Selected exhibitions include Constant Storm, USF Contemporary Art Museum, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s IDENTIFY: Performance as Portraiture series; Project 35: Last Call, Garage Museum, Russia; The Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, Orlando, FL 2015; Manifesta 8, Spain 2010; American Chambers, Gyeongnam Art Museum, South Korea; Performa 05 biennial, Artist Space, NY; The S Files 05, Museo de Arte, Puerto Rico; Artist in the Marketplace 25, Bronx Museum of the Arts; The L Factor, Exit Art, New York. Raimundi-Ortiz is an associate professor of studio art at the University of Central Florida.
Sara Reisman is a curator, writer, and educator based in New York City where she is the Chief Curator and Director of National Academician Affairs at the National Academy of Design. Most recently, Reisman was Executive and Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation (2014-2021), and has held roles as Director of the Percent for Art program at the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs (2008-2014), Associate Dean of the School of Art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (2008-2009), and Curatorial Consultant for Public Art at the Queens Museum (2009). Reisman has curated exhibitions locally and internationally for venues including the Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery, Futura Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, the Queens Museum of Art, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Cooper Union School of Art, the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, Momenta Art, and Smack Mellon, among other venues. She has been awarded residencies by Art Omi, the Foundation for a Civil Society, Artis, CEC Artslink, Futura, and the Montello Foundation. Reisman has taught art history and contemporary art at the University of Pennsylvania, SUNY Purchase School of Art + Design, and, since 2016, at the School of Visual Arts’ Curatorial Practice Master’s Program.