In the Studio: This Must Be the Place – Anna Bella Geiger

Anna Bella Geiger in conversation with Carla Stellweg, art historian.

Join us live on Instagram from your phone, or watch on YouTube after, for a series of conversations with some of the artists of This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975 to bring Americas Society's Visual Arts public programs to your home. Every other Wednesday this month, artists will dialogue with our guest host Carla Stellweg, to talk about their work and practice.

About the artist

Anna Bella Geiger (b. Rio de Janeiro, 1933) lived in New York from 1953 to 1955, when she studied at the New School. Since 1969, she would spend part of the year in the city with her children and her husband, a geographer that taught at Columbia University. Her photographs of the urban environment, such as empty subway cars and buildings captured in distorted perspective, evoke a sense of menace and function as metaphors for the dictatorship in Brazil. By 1964, Geiger became disenchanted with informal abstraction. Her work began to reflect the body's organic forms in a style the art critic Mário Pedrosa referred to as Geiger's "visceral phase." By the late 1960s, she felt the need to respond to the sociopolitical climate of her country. She participated in a boycott of the 10th Bienal de São Paulo (1969) and employed collage and assemblage to explore Brazilian identity and notions of the periphery. At this time her education in linguistics became central to her visual art. In the 1970s, she explored conceptualism and video art. The 1980s saw her renewed interest in painting, while in the 1990s she returned to multimedia sculpture of cartographic forms. In 1987, with the artist, critic, and professor Fernando Cocchiarale, she coauthored Geometric and Informal Abstractionism: The Brazilian Avant-garde in the Fifties, which became a key text for the study of contemporary art in Brazil. Geiger participated in international biennials held in São Paulo (1961, 1963, 1965, 1967, 1981, 1985, 1989, 1998), Venice (1980), Havana (1997), and Porto Alegre, Brazil (1997). She received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1982) and won several awards, including the Bolsa da Fundação Vitae, Prêmio SESC Rio de Fomento à Cultura (2010), and Prêmio Ibram de Arte Contemporânea (2011). Her work is held in important collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. She teaches at the HISK (Hoch Schule aus Kunst), Ghent, Belgium, at Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro and at SESC São Paulo, Brazil.  

About the guest speaker

Carla Stellweg is an independent consultant specializing in Latin American and Latinx art and artists. Throughout her career, she has worked as a museum and non-profit director, writer, editor, curator, and professor. Carla is considered a pioneer promoter and facilitator in Latin American international contemporary art. She was and continues to be instrumental in introducing many young and mid-career artists from Latin America, Latinx-U.S., Cuba and the Caribbean producing conceptual, socially-engaged art in both new and traditional media, either working in New York or from around the world.Along with the collectives Museo Latinoamericano and MICLA, many of which are exhibited in This Must Be the Place she created the artist book Contrabienal in 1971 in response to an international call to boycott the XI São Paulo Biennial in protest of the censorship and torture in dictatorial Brazil.

Visit the Americas Society Visual Arts YouTube Channel for recordings of In the Studio Series and other previous events.

Follow the conversation on Instagram: #IntheStudioAS | @americassociety.visualarts

More digital content from Visual Arts at Americas Society:

• Check out the current exhibition This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975 and read the exhibition catalogue.
• Check out the current iteration of our Flag Series: Felipe Mujica — Estrella Distante.
• Read about the previous exhibition Terence Gower: The Good Neighbour.
• Read the exhibition catalogue for Joaquín Orellana: The Spine of Music.
• Watch videos of recent events:
  • Terence Gower: The Good Neighbor
  • Terence Gower and Mexican Modernism
  • Reflections on Joaquín Orellana's Marimba Imaginaria
  • In Discussion: Presenting Biennial FEMSA XIV
  • Art at a Distance: Promoting Visual Arts during the Health Crisis