Artist Lecture: Tania Bruguera

The Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) and The Department of Painting and Printmaking at VCUarts welcome Tania Bruguera for an artist’s talk — the first to be held in the newly-opened ICA. It is held in conjunction with Bruguera’s ongoing project Escuela de Arte Útil / The School of Arte Arte Útil, which took the form of a VCU undergraduate seminar and is part of the ICA’s inaugural Declaration.

For over twenty-five years, Tania Bruguera (Cuban, born 1968) has created socially engaged performances and installations that examine the nature of political power structures and their effect on the lives of society’s most vulnerable individuals and groups. In Havana, Bruguera established the Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art) program at Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana in 2003 and recently opened the Hannah Arendt International Institute for Artivism, a school, exhibition space, and think tank for activist artists. In addition to Declaration (2018), her work was included in Documenta 11 (2002) and the 2015 Venice Biennale, and has been exhibited at Tate Modern, London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and other venues. Most recently her installation Untitled (Havana, 2000) was featured at MoMA, New York. She is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, and a Yale World Fellowship, and is the first artist-in-residence in the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. This lecture is co-organized by the ICA, VCU and The Department of Painting and Printmaking at VCUarts.