Public Events

Please join us for the first day of DPAM’s Spring/Summer 2023 exhibition: Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities. This exhibition is organized by Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) and curated by Erina Duganne, Associate Professor of Art History, Texas State University and Abigail Satinsky, TUAG Curator & Head of Public Engagement.

Image: Artists Call organizational meeting at Leon Golub’s and Nancy Spero’s studio, New York, 1984. Courtesy of Doug Ashford.

Please join us for a guided tour of Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities by exhibition co-curator Abigail Satinsky. The exhibition focuses on the seminal 1980s activist campaign, Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America. The exhibition highlights Artists Call’s history through a selection of activities and works from the 31 exhibitions and over 1,100 artists who participated in New York City and references Artists Call’s legacy today in new forms of inter-American solidarity networks and visual alliances. This exhibition is organized by Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) and curated by Erina Duganne, Associate Professor of Art History, Texas State University and Abigail Satinsky, TUAG Curator & Head of Public Engagement.

Abigail Satinsky is the Curator & Head of Public Engagement at Tufts University Art Galleries, where she has organized exhibitions & public projects with Sofía Córdova, Museum of Capitalism, Faheem Majeed, Press Press, Erin Genia, Josh MacPhee, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and others. She is also the Program Director for the Collective Futures Fund, which supports artist-run projects in Greater Boston through the Regional Regranting program of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Before coming to Tufts, she curated and collaborated on numerous projects in public space, artist-run galleries, and non-profit organizations, including directing residency, exhibitions and granting programs at Threewalls in Chicago and cofounding Hand in Glove, a national conference for artist-run culture. She was part of the artist research group InCUBATE and founded Sunday Soup, a micro-granting project which initiated 65 chapters internationally.

In partnership with the Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America (CRLN), DePaul Art Museum invites you to a panel discussion on international solidarity with current central american humanitarian defenders. Panelists include Daysi Funes, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Centro Romero, Yesenia Portillo, organizer with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, and Mario Venegas, torture survivor from Chile and in CRLN’s board. Moderated by CRLN’s Latin America Program Coordinator Jhonathan F. Gómez and DePaul Professor Lydia Saravia, this program focuses on social movements and organized communities within and between the U.S. and Latin America.

Presented in partnership with DePaul's Center for Latino Research

Join us for a screening of Yvonne Rainer’s The Man Who Envied Women (1985), a 16 mm film that records a broken marriage between a professor and his artist wife, incessantly interrupted by documentary footage. This grainy Super 8 footage is of two sets of political actions with which Rainer was personally involved in the first part of the 1980s: the activist organization Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America and Mayor Ed Koch’s Artist Homeownership Program, or AHOP.

Following the screening Professor Erina Duganne, co-curator of the exhibition Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities and Professor Daniel R. Quiles will be in conversation.

Presented in partnership with DePaul University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture.

Image: Yvonne Rainer, The Man Who Envied Women, 1985, 16mm, 125 minutes.

In conjunction with our current exhibition Art for the Future: Artist Call and Central American Solidarities, Chuquimarca presents “Art Projects For The Now”—an online presentation and panel discussion with directors Karon Corrales and Leonardo González from Honduran-based project space LL Proyectos and Gala Berger from Costa Rican-based project space Casa Ma. Moderated by Joshua Rios, contributor to the Art for the Future publication. This event presents examples of contemporary art projects and initiatives within each of the space’s respective localities. Join us to learn about these two Central American based art spaces that are programming, archiving, and revising their own localities, politics, and art histories. A discussion and Q&A will be conducted after presentations.

Chuquimarca is an art library project tasked to gather and share resources related to contemporary art and art histories. We gather art books, exhibit projects, and propose educational programs. We do a seasonal research group program called Tanda and a summer art writing program called Muña. Chuquimarca is based in Chicago, IL and is directed by John H. Guevara.

Curated by Jacob Lindgren from Inga Books (Pilsen, Chicago)—in collaboration with Carlos Henríquez Consalvi (“Santiago”), Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen, and Colectivo Audiovisual Guacamaya—this film screening features various generations of Salvadoran filmmakers and activists showing what it means to seize the means of projection and make films for and by communities in control of their own stories. Films shown in the program include La Zona Intertidal (1980) by El Taller de los Vagos, a deceptively calm fictional essay on the detainment, torture and assassination of Salvadoran teachers, Carta de Morazán (1982) by Sistema Radio Venceremos, a portrait of rebel military life in guerilla-controlled Morazán, and ¿Por que nos organizamos? (2022) by Colectivo Audiovisual Guacamaya, a weaving of both historical struggles and contemporary activism which stresses the importance of maintaining historical memory alive as means to avoid repeating the past.

During the 1980s, against the backdrop of El Salvador's civil war, revolutionary groups engaged in armed struggle turned to filmmaking as an equally fundamental weapon against oppression, misinformation, and the erosion of historical memory. Working towards an urgent, agitational, and conscious-raising—or revolutionary—cinema, the documentaries produced often depicted life (and death) in the guerilla’s zones of control, featuring scenes of agricultural work, civic festivals, education environments, and combat. Often without concern for cinematic tradition, filmmaking took place across a patchwork of formats, recording techniques, and abilities, with film frequently lost, destroyed, or buried underground for safety by one film crew to be unearthed by another. Always a collective effort, with a film’s credits typically entirely pseudonyms, the period produced several revolutionary and guerrilla filmmaking units, such as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front’s in-house media collective Sistema Radio Venceremos and the Fuerzas Populares de Liberación’s Instituto Cinematográfico de El Salvador Revolucionario.

Presented in partnership with DePaul's Center for Latino Research.