In the Studio: Sandra Monterroso

Sandra Monterroso in conversation with Aimé Iglesias Lukin, director and chief curator of Visual Arts.

Join us live on Instagram from your cell phone, or watch on YouTube after, for a series of remote visits to artists' studios to bring Americas Society's Visual Arts public programs to your home. Every other Wednesday this month, contemporary artists will dialogue with our Visual Arts department about their work and practice.

About the artist: 

Sandra Monterroso (1974) is a Guatemalan artist whose work relates to the acknowledgment of her Maya roots. She explores mostly the paradoxes of her mestizo indigenous heritage, little recognized in her native country. When her maternal grandmother was on her deathbed she asked the artist for water using the Maya Q’eqchi’ language; although Monterroso did not understand the literal translation of the words, she understood her world needed to change. Submerged in the impact of the Q’eqchi’ words the artist began to reconstruct her own story pursuing a geo-poetics of her past as it related to the indigenous world. Acknowledging her own indigenous past has been the greatest detonator for the development of her artistic practice over the last twenty years. To that end, Monterroso delves into the spaces that cross-culture, such as gender, racialized bodies, community feminism, modernity, and coloniality, using a variety of media that include video art, performance, painting, and sculpture. For the artist, it is very important to decontextualize symbolic elements that clash in the often-uncomfortable relationship between ancestral and contemporary cultures.

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:

• Read the exhibition catalogue for Feliciano Centurión: Abrigo.
• Watch the documentary Feliciano Centurión: Abrazo Íntimo al Natural, directed by Mon Ross (2016).
• Watch videos of recent events:
  • Art at a Distance: Promoting Visual Arts during the Health Crisis
  • Curator's Perspective – Jacopo Crivelli Visconti
  • "I Am Reborn at Every Moment" – Contemporary Reflections on Feliciano Centurión and AIDS
  • Ulises Carrión – Art, Mail, Books, and So…
  • Book Launch: Alejandra Seeber – Picture This Featuring the Artist in Conversation with Guillermo Kuitca