Join us online for a roundtable discussion with curator Yesomi Umolu, poet J. Michael Martinez, and artist Harold Mendez on their shared research around the transnational experience, ritual, cultural memory, the body, and migration for making artwork, writing poetry, and creating exhibitions. They recently collaborated on Harold Mendez: The Years Now, the first monograph on the artist to be released in January 2021 (The University of Chicago Press).

This event will be a free Zoom webinar. Please RSVP

Yesomi Umolu was recently appointed Director of Curatorial Affairs and Public Practice at the Serpentine Galleries. She was previously Director and Curator, Logan Center Exhibitions at the University of Chicago where she also taught courses in visual art and spatial practices as a lecturer in the humanities division. Prior to joining the Logan, Umolu held curatorial positions at the MSU Broad Museum; Walker Art Center; and Manifesta 8, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art.

Umolu has worked on key solo exhibitions and commissioned projects with Assemble, Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares, John Akomfrah, Mike Cloud, Mariana Castillo Deball, Kapwani Kiwanga, Candice Lin, Harold Mendez, Camille Norment, Karthik Pandian and Andros Zins-Browne, among others. As Artistic Director of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, Umolu oversaw a critically acclaimed curatorial program featuring new commissions, off-site installations and a host of performances, talks, workshops and community engagements with over 80 international contributors.

Umolu is a 2016 recipient of the prestigious Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts Curatorial Fellowship. She has been a visiting lecturer and critic at numerous universities including Williams College; University College London; University of Michigan; and University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, among others. She served on the curatorial advisory board for the United States Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale. She is a trustee of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago.

J. Michael Martinez was longlisted for the National Book Award, winner of the National Poetry Series, and a recipient of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, J. Michael Martinez is the author of three collections of poetry, Museum of the Americas (Penguin, 2018), In The Garden of the Bridehouse (University of Arizona Press, 2014), and Heredities (Louisiana State University Press, 2009). He is a poetry editor for NOEMI Press and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry at St. Lawrence University. J. Michael lives in upstate NY.

Harold Mendez has taken part in numerous exhibitions such as  Being: New Photography  (2018) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Biennial (2017), New York. Mendez was recently the subject of a solo presentation, The years now at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. In addition, his work has been shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Bass Museum, Miami; LAXART, Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; MoMA PS1, New York; Renaissance Society, Chicago; Project Row Houses, Houston; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. Mendez has been awarded residencies at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Light Work, Syracuse; the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; and the Headlands Center for the Arts. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Minneapolis Institute of Art; the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; and the Colección Diéresis, Guadalajara, Mexico. Mendez studied at Columbia College Chicago; the University of Science and Technology, School of Art, Ghana, West Africa; and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is currently based in Los Angeles.

About the monograph: Harold Mendez: The Years Now
The 2020 exhibition Harold Mendez: The years now presented a suite of existing and newly commissioned works—including photography, sculpture and sound—by visual artist Harold Mendez at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. Mendez’s practice draws on artifacts and rituals from sites across the Americas, spanning from pre-Columbian times to the present, to create poetic assemblages that connect histories of violence and erasure with acts of renewal and remembrance. Building on a process-driven approach, in The years now, the artist employed various techniques such as digital scanning, three-dimensional printing, photo transfer, and sonic amplifications to explore the apparitions of bodies, and the ego across materials, site, and memory.

Featuring installation views and research material, this volume is the first substantial monograph dedicated to the artist’s work. This publication includes a foreword by director and curator Yesomi Umolu, contributions from scholar and curator Candice Hopkins and poet J. Michael Martinez, and an interview with Mendez and curator Katja Rivera.

The book will be available for purchase in January 2021 through The University of Chicago Press here