6660 Manasota Key Road
“Visualizing Culture”
with Hermitage Fellows Diana Al-Hadid, Raven Chacon, and Candice Hopkins
Thursday, May 23 at 6:30pm
Hermitage Beach (entrance at 6660 Manasota Key Rd, Englewood, FL 34223)
Register here.
Registration is required. $5 per person.
Art, no matter the medium, helps to make abstract concepts like culture and broad historical narrative a palpable, personal experience. Engaging directly with this idea through her work currently on display at the Sarasota Art Museum, internationally acclaimed visual artist Diana Al-Hadid‘s art “is a masterclass in duality… both ancient and modern, fierce and delicate, simultaneously growing and disintegrating—reminding us there is no such thing as a fixed state,” (Vogue). In a special beach program, Al-Hadid discusses her work alongside Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon whose unique graphic scores capture “a concentrated and powerful musical expression with a haunting visceral impact,” (New York Times). Adding insight and nuance to the conversation is Candice Hopkins, a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation whose curated exhibitions have traveled across the country and around the world. Join these remarkable creators for insights into their groundbreaking processes and perspectives on the contemporary arts landscape.
Returning Hermitage Fellow Diana Al-Hadid examines the historical frameworks and perspectives that continue to shape discourse on culture and materials today. With a practice spanning sculpture, wall reliefs, and works on paper, the artist weaves together enigmatic narratives that draw inspiration from both ancient and modern civilizations. Al-Hadid’s rich allegorical constructions are born from art historical religious imagery, ancient manuscripts, female archetypes, and folkloric storytelling. Born in Aleppo, Syria in 1981, Al-Hadid lives and works between upstate New York and Brooklyn, NY. She received a BFA in Sculpture and a BA in Art History from Kent State University (2003); an MFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University (2005); and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2007). She has been the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, and The Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award. She is also a Hermitage Artist Retreat Fellow, a USA Rockefeller Fellow, and in 2022, she was awarded a Fellowship with the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship Program. Al-Hadid’s work can be found in numerous institutional collections worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece, among others. Her work is currently on display at Sarasota Art Museum as part of the exhibition Impact: Contemporary Artists at the Hermitage Artist Retreat.
Hermitage Fellow Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, and a member of Postcommodity from 2009 to 2018, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; San Francisco Electronic Music Festival; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Vancouver Art Gallery; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Borealis Festival, Seattle; SITE Santa Fe; Chaco Canyon, New Mexico; Ende Tymes Festival, New York; The Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Biennial, New York; documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; Carnegie International, and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.
Hermitage Fellow Candice Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation and lives in Red Hook, New York. Her writing and curatorial practice explore the intersections of history, contemporary art, and Indigeneity. She is Executive Director of Forge Project (Taghkanic, NY) and Senior Curator for the 2019 and 2022 editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art. She was part of the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion at the fifty-eighth Venice Biennale, featuring the work of the media art collective Isuma; and co-curator of notable exhibitions including the national traveling survey Art for New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now; SITElines.2018: Casa Tomada, SITE Santa Fe; documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; and Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Notable essays include “The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier,” in the documenta 14 Reader; “Outlawed Social Life,” in South as a State of Mind; and “The Appropriation Debates (or The Gallows of History),” in Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (New Museum/MIT Press, 2020).