Exhibition

  • Building Cycles 2
    José Esparza Chong Cuy
    Curator
    Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York
    Sep 01, 2021 to May 31, 2022
  • GRANTEE
    Storefront for Art and Architecture
    GRANT YEAR
    2020

Miguel Fernández de Castro and Natalia Mendoza, research for "The Absolute Restoration of All Things." Courtesy the artists and Storefront for Art and Architecture

Storefront for Art and Architecture continues its new curatorial framework, Building Cycles. Building upon the successful model developed during the first year of Building Cycles, the second year of the project begins in 2021. As part of this iteration, Storefront focuses on issues of landscape and territory, presenting four exhibitions along with accompanying events (in partnership with local and international groups and organizations). The program starts with an exhibition by Miguel Fernández de Castro and Natalia Mendoza called The Absolute Restoration of All Things, which focuses on the regeneration of a former mining community in Sonora, Mexico, following a legal mandate to return the land to its original form and to return all the gold extracted from it. Over the course of the year, the program unfolds to explore a diverse set of approaches to the use of land and the negotiation of borders and entities in physical space.

Miguel Fernández de Castro is a visual artist whose work examines how extractive and criminal economies materially transform a territory. Through long-term projects he has developed a body of work through photography, video, sculpture, archives, and writing. His work has been shown at Frac Centre-Val de Loire, Orleans; e-flux, New York; Museo de Geología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City; Spazio Veda, Florence; The Wren Library, Cambridge; Museo Artium, Vitoria; Proyecto Paralelo, Mexico City; Casa del Lago, Mexico City; Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; Museo de Arte Moderno de México, Mexico City; Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver; Bikini Wax, Mexico City; Museum of Latin American Art, Los Angeles; among others. Recently, he has been resident at PAOS, Guadalajara, and at Casa Gallina-InSite, Mexico City.

Natalia Mendoza Rockwell received a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University (2015), and is currently assistant professor of anthropology at Fordham University. Her research examines the confluence of criminal and extractive economies—from smuggling to clandestine fishing—in the Sonora desert borderlands, where she has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork since 2005. Her research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright, Conacyt, and the European Research Council. She is the author of Conversaciones en el Desierto: Cultura y Tráfico de Drogas (CIDE, 2007/2017) and a dozen articles. Mendoza Rockwell has a monthly column at Nexos, a Mexican magazine of political and cultural analysis.

José Esparza Chong Cuy is the executive director and chief curator at Storefront for Art and Architecture. Formerly, he was the Pamela Alper Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where he organized solo exhibitions and projects with Jonathas de Andrade, Federico Herrero, Mika Horibuchi, and Tania Pérez Córdova. He is also cocurator of the retrospective exhibition Lina Bo Bardi: Habitat, which is jointly organized between MASP in Sao Paulo, the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Previously, he was associate curator at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City.

Storefront for Art and Architecture advances innovative and critical ideas that contribute to the design of cities, territories, and public life. Storefront's exhibitions, events, competitions, publications, and projects provide alternative platforms for dialogue and collaboration across disciplinary, geographic, and ideological boundaries. Since its founding in 1982, Storefront has presented the work of over one thousand architects and artists.