Tribeca, New York
Group Exhibition
Threads to the South
Institute for Studies on Latin American ArtOlga de Amaral, Gustavo Caboco, Feliciano Centurión, Manuel Chavajay, Nora Correas, Gracia Cutuli, Antonio Dias, John Dugger, Jorge Eielson, Elvira Espejo Ayca, Cristina Flores Pescorán, Anna Bella Geiger, Marlene Hoffman, Nelson Leirner, Lidia Lisbôa, Mónica Millán, Sandra Monterroso, Julieth Morales, Hélio Oiticica, Marta Palau, Antonio Pichillá, Cecilia Vicuña The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) is proud to present Threads to the South, curated by Anna Burckhardt Pérez. The exhibition features works by over twenty artists from ten countries, including videos, photographs, paintings, works on paper, and textiles developed between 1967 and 2023. Through these varied works, Threads to the South considers the medium of fiber as a conceptual tool for exploring the relationship between belonging, identity, and territory in Latin America. The exhibition title is borrowed from the poem “I am climbing threads to the South” by Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña. Having lived most of her life in exile from her homeland, Vicuña writes of longing for her home and climbing symbolic threads that connect her to her roots in the south. The exhibition showcases how artists have used fiber, thread, and textiles in disparate ways to chart connections to their roots. Spanning ISLAA’s upstairs exhibition space and its two lower-level galleries, Threads to the South illustrates how fiber serves as a bridge between distinct times and places, embedded with histories and cultural traditions, including the complexities of national and individual identities in and from Latin America. The artists in the exhibition use thread to communicate physical or emotional displacement as they long, search, and strive for real and imagined territories to ground themselves firmly in Latin America. Together, these works underscore the processes of making and feeling through fiber to question colonial conceptions of time and place, produce alternative art histories, and create new ideas of home. Anna Burckhardt Pérez is a curator and writer from Bogotá interested in the intersections of contemporary art, craft, technology, community-based practices, and ecologies in Latin America. She is currently the Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC). Prior to joining AIC, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she curated and co-organized several exhibitions and programs, most recently, Projects: Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas (2022).