Join us for a discussion with the artist Pedro Pérez, who will be in conversation with Luis Pérez-Oramas, poet and curator, and Maria de los Angeles Torres, political scientist. Organized in conjunction with the exhibition “Pedro Pérez: Back the Same Day”, this conversation brings together the artist with two radical thinkers to consider key themes in the exhibition, including Pérez's compelling exploration of temporality.
LUIS PEREZ-ORAMAS is a Venezuelan poet, art historian and curator. He received his PhD in Art History under the direction of Louis Marin and Hubert Damisch at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France, in 1993. In 2003 Luis Pérez-Oramas became Adjunct Curator in the Department of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; in 2006, he was appointed The Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art at MoMA, a position that he held until 2017. Prior to MoMA, Pérez-Oramas was professor of art history at the Université de Haute Bretagne-Rennes 2, France (1987-1991); Ecole Régionale Superieure des Beaux Arts de Nantes, France (1992-1994); and the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Artes Plásticas Armando Reverón, Caracas, Venezuela (1994-2002), as well as Curator of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Caracas (1994-2002). In addition, Pérez-Oramas served as the Chief Curator of the Thirtieth São Paulo Biennial, The Imminence of Poetics, in 2012. He is the author of several exhibition catalogues, seven volumes of essais on art, politics and social issues andeleven titles based on his poetry, among them most recently Balada de Joey Stefano (in collaboration with artist Matheus Chiaratti) (São Paulo: Ikrek-Quadra, 2023), Animal vesperal (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2022), La (in)actualidad de la pintura y vericuetos de la imagen (Valencia: Pre-textos, 2021). Since 2017 he serves as curatorial advisor to the Hochschild Correa Collection of Latin American Art, Lima, Perú, and since 2019 he acts as curatorial advisor for the Nara Roesler group of galleries, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and New York. He currently lives and works in New York.
MARIA DE LOS ANGELES TORRES is distinguished university professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has written extensively on Latinos, Cuba and Cuban exiles’ politics and identity, immigration, culture and has authored In the Land of Mirrors: The Politics of Cuban Exiles in the United States and The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the US and the Promise of a Better Future; co-authored Citizens in the Present: Civically Engaged Youth in the Americas, edited By Heart/De Memoria: Cuban Women’s Journeys in and Out of Exile and co-edited Borderless Borders Latinos, Latin American and the Paradoxes of Interdependence and Global Cities and Immigrant: The Case of Chicago and Madrid. In January 2024, the University of Florida will release her most recent book, Time and Democracy in Cuban Thought: The Elusive Present. She is co-recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to work on a project on the impact of Cuba’s war in Angola on Cubans on the island and abroad. She was director of the UIC Latin American and Latino Studies Program and of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research. She is presently working on two programs funded by the Mellon Foundation that support graduate students in Latino Humanities. She is on the editorial boards of the academic journals Latino Oral Histories and Dialogo. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who has contributed to art history projects including compiling a virtual collection of One Hundred Years of Chicago Latino Art and Chicago Latino Virtual Gallery. She served as dramaturge to the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. She is a frequent media commentator on US/Cuba relations and immigration. Professor Torres has a long history of public service including serving as Director to Mayor Harold Washington’s Commission on Latino Affairs, and as advisor to Obama Transition team on Latin American issues and on Biden’s Higher Education team. She was a board member of the Illinois Humanities Council and is presently on the Civic Committee for the Goodman Theatre and on Miami Freedom Project’s board of advisors.
