Uncovering Alice Rahon: a conversation about the artist's first monograph

Wednesday, March 24, 2021

5:00 PM – 6:15 PM PDT

Register HERE

Like her poetry, Alice Rahon’s paintings are thick with mythology and magic, memory and meaning. Compelled as deeply by prehistoric cave paintings as by the Surrealist milieu in which she lived and worked, Rahon wove symbols, colors, and textures together in delicate combinations of figuration and abstraction that are abundant with stories and secrets.

In celebration of our forthcoming publication, Alice Rahon, the first English-language monograph on the artist, Wendi Norris will moderate a group discussion via Zoom with the three scholars who have contributed new research and insights on this multifaceted artist.

Tere Arcq is the world's foremost expert on Rahon's life and work. In 2019 she curated a one-woman exhibition of Rahon's work in Miami, preceded by a Rahon show at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City.

Renowned Mexico City-based scholar and curator Daniel Garza-Usabiaga relates Rahon’s work to contemporary art practices and uncovers its relationship to Mexican modernism and Wolfgang Paalen's theories shared in his acclaimed journal, Dyn.

Maggie Borowitz, a Fulbright-Hays scholar with a focus on art and feminism in Mexico City, explores the meaning and process of Rahon’s materiality and artistic processes and mediums.

This event comes at an exciting time in regards to the artist. Rahon began as a poet before becoming a visual artist, and in June The New York Review of Books’ NYRB Poets will release a comprehensive collection of Rahon’s poetry, translated from its original French by Mary Ann Caws. The Getty Research Institute is amidst the acquisition of the artist's archive, and the Art Institute of Chicago has acquired two of her paintings which are currently on view.

To learn more about the book and to pre-order a copy, visit our website here.

We look forward to having you in attendance via Zoom on March 24.

Alice Rahon, Autorretrato con autobiografía (Self-Portrait with Autobiography), 1948, oil and sand on canvas, 29 1/2 x 22 1/2 inches (75 x 57 cm), courtesy of the Mary and Leigh Block Endowment Fund (2020.248), The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, U.S.A.