Curator Talk: Pilar Tompkins Rivas
ABOUT THE TALK
Join us for a talk with Summer 2020 residency Guest Curator Pilar Tompkins Rivas. Visiting Texas for studio visits to select the Summer 2020 Texas-based resident artist, Tompkins Rivas will stop off in San Antonio for a talk about her career with a focus on her work as a curator of contemporary Latinx art.
Doors at 6:00pm
Talk at 6:30pm
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Pilar Tompkins Rivas is the director of Vincent Price Art Museum (VPAM) at East Los Angeles College, a collecting institution with diverse holdings includingPre-Columbian, Native American, and modern and contemporary art. At VPAM she has spearheaded partnerships between the museum and the Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Huntington Library, Art Collection and Botanical Gardens. Prior to her appointmentas director, she served as the coordinator of curatorial initiatives at LACMA, where she helped launch and co-directed two Mellon-funded programs for the museum: the UCLA-LACMA Art History Practicum Initiative and The Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship Program. She has practiced as an independent curator since 2002, and was the director of residency programs at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica.
Specializing in U.S. Latino and Latin American contemporary art, she has organized dozens of exhibitions throughout the United States, Colombia, Egypt, France, and Mexico. Among the exhibitions that she has curated or co-curated are “Home –So Different, So Appealing” (LACMA; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston), “A Universal History of Infamy” (LACMA), “Regeneración: Three Generations of Revolutionary Ideology” (VPAM), “Tastemakers & Earthshakers: Notes from Los Angeles Youth Culture, 1943-2016” (VPAM), “A Decolonial Atlas: Strategies in Contemporary Art of the Americas” (VPAM; Tufts University Art Gallery; Union College; Oficina de Proyectos Culturales, Puerta Vallarta, Mexico; OFF Biennial Cairo, Egypt), “Guadalupe Rosales: Echoes of a Collective Memory” (VPAM), “Patrick Martinez: America is For Dreamers” (VPAM), “ASCO and Friends: Exiled Portraits” (Triangle France, Marseille), “L.A. Xicano” (LACMA; the UCLA Fowler Museum; the Autry National Center), and “Vexing: Female Voices from East L.A. Punk” (Claremont Museum of Art).
This program is funded in part by Arts & Culture, City of San Antonio, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Linda Pace Foundation, and the San Antonio Area Foundation.