“Sweety’s Radio: Edición Especial” Exhibition

“Sweety’s Radio: Edición Especial” Exhibition

Cuchifritos

This event has ended.

Curated by Sweety’s: Bryan Rodriguez Cambana, Julia Mata, Eduardo Restrepo Castaño and Ximena Izquierdo Ugaz

INTERVIEW DATES
Friday, June 30, 6-8P: Cecilia Gentili (Exhibition Dates: June 27 through July 2)
Friday, July 7, 6-8P: Raul Gonzalez III (Exhibition Dates: July 4 through July 9)
Friday, July 14, 6-8P: Emanuel Xavier (Exhibition Dates: July 11 through July 16)
Friday, July 21, 6-8P: Elia Alba (Exhibition Dates: July 18 through July 23)

Sweety’s Radio is a live talk-show/installation project developed by Sweety’s – a curatorial initiative conceived by artists Julia Mata, Bryan Rodriguez Cambana, Ximena Izquierdo Ugaz, and Eduardo Restrepo Castaño that since 2013, works on seeking out spaces and producing events dedicated to the labor of black and brown artists.

At Cuchifritos, the collective will host Edición Especial, a special iteration of Sweety’s Radio that focuses on Spanish-speaking cultural producers, as a means to bridge the conversations taking place amongst black and brown (Spanish-speaking) communities in and outside of the U.S. From June 27th through July 30th Sweety’s programming will consist of weekly interviews featuring four invited artists whose work will take over the Cuchifritos space for each week, culminating in a collaborative installation by the four members of Sweety’s.

In response to the local community surrounding Cuchifritos and Essex Street Market, as well as the history of the Lower East Side as Loisaida, and the curators’ personal investment as immigrants and first generation, Sweety’s brings together four artists: Cecilia Gentili, Emanuel Xavier, Raul Gonzalez III, Elia Alba.

A B O U T T H E A R T I S T S

CECILIA GENTILI, originally from Argentina, worked at the LGBT Center, Apicha CHC and currently serves as the Director of Public Affairs at GMHC. She was a contributor to Trans Bodies Trans Selves and is a board member at Translatina Network. That’s for work. For fun, she acts sometimes and loves doing storytelling events where she talks about her life experiences and she cooks amazing brunches for her friends on the weekends. She is very passionate about advocating for her community, and mostly for transgender women with a Latino background, sex work history, drug use and incarceration history.

RAUL GONZALEZ is an award winning artist from El Paso/Juarez living in Medford MA. He is the illustrator and co-creator of the critically acclaimed and award-winning books Lowriders in Space and Lowriders to the Center of the Earth with Cathy Camper. He makes his home with his two loves Elaine Bay and Raul El Gonzalez IV.

EMANUEL XAVIER, an LGBT History Month Icon and Gay City News Impact Award recipient, is the author of the poetry collections Radiance, Nefarious, Americano, Pier Queen, If Jesus Were Gay and the novel Christ Like. A former homeless teen involved in NYC’s ball scene in the 90s and one of the first openly gay Nuyorican poets, he has been a longtime gay rights activist, AIDS activist, and homeless youth advocate. He was featured on Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, has spoken at The United Nations, was a featured TEDx speaker and was filmed for a soon-to-be-released documentary on poets from around the world. He continues to perform at colleges and universities throughout the country and his books are often included in LGBTQ and Latino Studies courses.

ELIA ALBA was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1962. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Hunter College in 1994 and completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001. She has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad. Those include The Rhode Island School of Design Museum; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The Science Museum, London; ITAU Cultural Institute, Sao Paolo; National Museum of Art, Reina Sofía, Madrid and the 10th Havana Biennial. She is also recipient of numerous awards and residencies, for example, Studio Museum in Harlem Artist-in-Residence Program in 1999; New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, Crafts 2002 and Photography 2008; Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant, 2002 and Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant 2002 and 2008; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Workspace Program, 2009 and LMCC Process Space 2016; Recess Analog, 2012. Her work is in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, Lowe Art Museum to name a few. For the past five years, she has been working on a publication/event series title “The Supper Club”, currently supported by The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, The 8th Floor. The project brings together artists, scholars, and performers through portraiture, food, and dialogue to examine race and culture. A solo show on The Supper Club is forthcoming fall 2017 at The 8th Floor.

A B O U T S W E E T Y ‘ S

XIMENA IZQUIERDO UGAZ is a multimedia artist, curator, and educator born in Lima, Perú. Her work primarily touches on the imprint of inter-generational trauma within her own family in relationship to place and migration. She is one of the Teen Programs Coordinators at the Brooklyn Museum, the visual arts co-curator at Nat Brut as well as a founding member and co-curator of Sweety’s, a gallery and platform dedicated to supporting and exhibiting artists of color. In addition, Izquierdo Ugaz is the author of the self-published Standing in the Bathroom in the Dark Thinking About Green, El Mismo Pozo/The Same Well, Plan B and Uñas.

JULIA MATA is an artist, illustrator, and curator from Southern California, currently based in New York. Her work has been shown in print in Hysteria Magazine and Kinks Magazine as well as in exhibitions in Baltimore and Boston, including a commissioned mural by the Urbano Project. She has also participated in creating visuals for the writing literacy project “Bodega Signs and Wonders” that led to her designing a bodega sign that was later installed in Boston’s Egleston Square. Her first self-published comic CRISIS! is upcoming this summer.

BRYAN RODRIGUEZ CAMBANA is an interdisciplinary artist and curator based in New York City. He is a BFA graduate from Tufts University and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Rodriguez is also co-founder of Sweety’s, a curatorial initiative catered to artists of color. Attendance to residencies such as The Vermont Studio Center and Subsamson at Samson Projects, among others, has lead to his participation in exhibitions at LAMAG and The Queens Museum. In addition, he is a contributor to the third volume of Emergency INDEX Publication and resident artist (with Sweety’s) at Cuchifritos Gallery and Project Space.

EDUARDO RESTREPO CASTAÑO examines, through a practice that draws from academic research and lived experience, the relationship between social imaginaries surrounding nature, gender difference, and the diasporic condition. Co-founder of curatorial platform Sweety’s, as well as participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, restrepo castaño has exhibited in spaces such as SOMA (Mexico,) Musée de l’Élysés (Switzerland,) and Bruce High Quality Foundation (New York,) Museum of Jaén (Spain.)

Media

• Performance Art

ADVERTISE ON NYAB