Since January 31, 2017, the USC Fisher Museum of Art has been collaborating with Art Division, a non-profit organization dedicated to training and supporting underserved young adults who are committed to studying visual arts, on a semester-long project that has brought Art Division students to the USC campus as part of a residency at the Fisher Museum.
Art Division students, surrounded by works from Fisher’s permanent collection in the museum’s center gallery, have been using the museum as their studio space while attending public workshops led by artists and scholars.
In March, with the collaboration of the Mexican Consulate of Los Angeles, artist Demián Flores will be at the Fisher Museum for a week, interacting with Art Division, USC students and the general public through his, Mardonio Carballo’s and Marco Barrera Bassols’ new project, MONTARlaBestia, which will take over Fisher’s center gallery for three weeks between March 19 – April 8, 2017. The project will be an interdisciplinary exploration of the possibilities of Fisher’s original collaboration.
MONTARlaBestia is an exhibition that responds to “La Bestia”– a train that carries as many as half a million Central American immigrants annually on their journey to the United States – through art and poetry by the artist collective, “El Colectivo Artistas Contra la Discriminación.”
Fisher Museum dives into the debate about immigration reform through MONTARlaBestia, thrilled to bring the Consul General of Mexico in Los Angeles, the Director of the USC Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII), the Executive Director of ACLU’s Southern California chapter, the founder of Art Division, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and a PhD student whose work examines Latino immigrant youth to the table via public programming.
Supported by film screenings at the Mexican Consulate, as well as panels and workshops, Fisher will continue to keep the young artists in Art Division in the conversation with the understanding that they are the lightning rods for future artistic political activism.
Demián Flores was first exhibited by the Fisher Museum in 2006 and has works in the museum’s permanent collection, as well as in the collections of El Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) and London Print Studio, among others.
Mardonio Carballo is a renowned journalist, author, and social activist.
Marco Barrera Bassols is one of Mexico’s most esteemed independent curators. He has worked on important international art projects, including with MoMA in New York.
MONTARlaBestia and USC Fisher Museum of Art/Art Division: Artists in Residence
March 19 Opening Reception
Program
1:00 p.m.
Open Discussion
Marco Barrera Bassols, Demián Flores, Mardonio Carballo, Curators of MONTARlaBestia
Professor Manuel Pastor, Director of the USC Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII)
Hector Villagra, Executive Director, ACLU of Southern California
Dan McCleary, Founder of Art Division
2:00 – 4:00 p.m.
Reception
Remarks by
Michael W. Quick, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
Ambassador Carlos García de Alba, Consul General of Mexico in Los Angeles