On the Surface:  Wearable Art Banners

January 25 – February 8, 2012

With Surface Design Class, Mount Ida College

Questions about graphic images, body adornment, textile and art guided advanced fashion-design students to create a bright, colorful, collaborative fabric collage.

Senior and junior level students from the Fashion Design Department at Mount Ida College in Newton, MA used several techniques learned during their Surface Design and Textile class to express what surface design means to them. Founded in 1899, Mount Ida is a private coeducational institution, located eight miles from downtown Boston in Newton, Massachusetts.  The Design program provides a solid academic foundation with extensive professional preparation, including coursework in design principles and hands-on experience using the most up-to-date technology in the industry. For more information, visit www.mountida.edu.

For his first solo exhibition in Boston, William Cordova (b. 1971, Lima, Peru) brings together new and recent works in sculpture, installation, video and works on paper by the Miami/New York-based artist, unmasking and remixing seemingly disparate and repressed histories through thoughtful and subtle juxtapositions of familiar detritus.

CALENDAR OF EVENTS | FREE and open to the public

Opening reception | Friday, February 10 at 6pm

Families Connect Workshop | Saturday, February 11 at 2pm

The Peruvian-born artist’s work imbues displaced historical narratives with new meaning, conflating previous events with contemporary context and creating rich monuments to individuals, events, and cultural and ritual signifiers. His materials reflect the temporality of the subjects themselves, using discarded pages from books, reclaimed wood and stones, newsprint, found footage and salvaged cars to conjure intimate connections between far-reaching chronological points.

Curated by Evan J. Garza, Exhibitions & Public Programs Coordinator, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Editor-at-Large, New American Paintings.

“William Cordova’s practice is inextricably linked with concepts of disparity, interpretation, transformation, and re-contextualization,” says curator, Evan J. Garza. “His works create arbitrary and ephemeral juxtapositions of historical narratives and cultural iconographies that reconstruct sites, events, and understandings, and which conjure freshly rendered contexts for people and places that we were certain had all but disappeared. His candid use of reclaimed materials recalls the unrevealed and historicized nature of the things we use, siphoned through a multilingual vernacular that simultaneously questions and redefines our understanding of meaning.”

A native of Houston, Texas, Evan J. Garza is the co-founder of Fire Island Artist Residency, the first residency for emerging GLBT artists in the United States. william cordova: this one’s 4U (pa’ nosotros) is Garza’s second guest-curated exhibition for the Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts. In 2010, he was the inaugural curator of the BCA Artist Studios Project.

The Boston Center for the Arts and Garza have partnered with the deCordova Sculpture Park + Museum in Lincoln, MA where, for an entire year, the museum will exhibit William Cordova’s outdoor sculpture moby dick (for oscar wilde, oscar romero y oscar grant), 2008–2009, the bombed-out, spray-painted rear half of a reclaimed police car, a collaboration with Carlos Sandoval de Leon.

The BCA's Visual Arts Programs are generously supported by the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

IMAGE CREDIT: william cordova this is not 4U (i miss U already), 2010 | Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York