This year’s Cornerstone Arts Week showcases artists and speakers who are minding the gap through collaborations across social boundaries, involvement in social justice and environmental issues, and seminal discussions involving access to platforms and opportunity.

Curator Polly Nordstrand and 2019-20 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation artist-in-residence Anna Tsouhlarakis have invited this panel of artists to share their experiences of the contemporary art world, how they themselves have created access, and how their artistic practice unsettles the canons of art.

Panelists:

• William Cordova is a multimedia artist whose work notably reshapes ideas of transition and displacement. Cordova earned a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and MFA from Yale University. Cordova grew up in both Lima and Miami, and the impact of his multicultural childhood experience manifests in his politically charged art. Cordova’s work offers a narrative which refracts from the conventional understanding of history through the pairing of found objects, which he believes bear their own history. From paintings to sculpture, Cordova disputes the idea of art as solely for aesthetic reasons and, in turn, wields art as means to prioritizes voices and histories that are never heard or told.
• Leslie Hewitt earned a BFA from the Cooper Union and MFA from Yale University. Hewitt’s work often is an amalgamation of photography and sculpture which are heavily influenced by personal mementos — including family pictures and vintage magazines — that emanate a meaning through juxtapositions. Hewitt’s work has promptly gained a reputation for grace and power as she uses artistry to conjure one’s own reconsideration of the role of time and history in the contemporary world.
• Nora Naranjo Morse earned a BA from the College of Santa Fe, but then turned away from her professional training to art making. Although known for her clay and cast metal sculpture, Naranjo Morse is forging a new direction in her work by working with alternative materials and media. Working with local clay and repurposed discarded materials such as wire and plastic, Naranjo Morse’s installations address her concerns for the environment and the way people — Native and non-Native — live in the contemporary world. Expanding her body of public artworks, she has completed several billboard projects that challenge communities to interrogate their engagement with Indigenous people and their homelands.
• Anna Tsouhlarakis earned a BA from Dartmouth College and MFA from Yale University, and since then has been challenging the Anglo-imposed canon of Native art. Working across a range of media, Tsouhlarakis has developed an artistic practice that explores themes of Native American identity through resolutely contemporary means. With a body of work that includes sculpture, video, performance, photography, and installation, Tsouhlarakis aims to expand the terms of what constitutes Native aesthetics, pushing viewers to confront and rethink their own cultural expectations when encountering the work of Native artists. The focus of her work is to create and uncover new truths.

This event is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant for Southwest Arts and Culture, Cultural Attractions Fund.