Adela Goldbard – Envisioning Justice

Adela Goldbard is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who believes in the potential of art to generate critical thinking and social transformation. Her work questions the politics of memory by suspecting power relations and social constructs behind official history, archeological preservation, patriotism, state-sanctioned celebrations, and mass media. She is especially interested in how destruction can become a ritual, a statement, a metaphor, a way of remembering and a form of disobedience.

Goldbard holds an MFA as a Full Merit Fellow in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Language and Literature from the National University of Mexico. She was granted the prestigious Joyce Award in 2019 and is the 2017 SAIC Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize. From 2015 to 2018 she was a member of the National System of Artistic Creators of Mexico. Goldbard is Assistant Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. Originally from Mexico City, she lives and works in the United States and Mexico.

About Commissioned Project

Adela will be working in the Little Village community and partnering with Gallery 400, the Artsumex Collective from Mexico City, and multiple local teaching artists and schools.

Adela’s project, entitled The Last Judgment, is a co-created, participatory artwork that will culminate in a pyrotechnic performance featuring the ritual destruction of large-scale sculptures built as scenography for a series of narrative vignettes co-written and performed by Little Village residents of multiple generations. A multilingual (Spanish, English, Náhuatl) script based on environmental justice, migration, incarceration, lateral violence, and the gentrification concerns, struggles, and life experiences of Little Village residents is being developed collaboratively with Little Village residents through a series of art-making and theatre workshops facilitated by local artists.

Local teaching artists William Estrada, Teresa Magaña, Juan-Carlos Perez, and Silvia Inés Gonzalez, and art teacher Sue Voss are facilitating printmaking, sculpture, mixed media, and community art workshops at Telpochcalli Elementary School, John Spry Community School, Hammond Elementary School, and Universidad Popular/Yollocalli Arts Reach to collect local histories through making, to design the structures to be built and destroyed, and to reflect together about re-staging, changing, and correcting narratives through art; Corazon de Valor y Fortaleza (Pilsen) is working with Telpochcalli Community Education Project (La Villita) to develop a script under Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed methodology; Artsumex Collective (Tultepec, México) is working with community members to build the effigies; Mariachi Pantera of Little Village Academy is working on the soundtrack for the performance, which will take place on November 2nd, 2019.

More about Adela Goldbard

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