Deborah Cullen appointed curator of the 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana
14 September–24 November 2013
Organized by the International
Centre of Graphic Arts
www.mglc-lj.si
The International Centre of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana is delighted to announce the appointment of Deborah Cullen as a curator of the 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana. The jubilee Biennial will take place from 14 September to 24 November 2013.
Deborah Cullen, PhD is Director & Chief Curator of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in the City of New York. She served as Chief Curator for El Panal/The Hive: 3ra Trienal Poligráfica de San Juan: América Latina y el Caribe, Puerto Rico (2012). Previously, she was Director of Curatorial Programs at El Museo del Barrio, New York, where she was an editor for the 500-page anthology Caribbean: Art at the Crossroads of the World (El Museo del Barrio and Yale University Press, 2012). Other exhibitions include Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis (2009) and the internationally traveling project Arte no es Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000 (2008-2011) for which she received an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award. She curated Retro/Active: The Work of Rafael Ferrer (2010) and authored the monograph Rafael Ferrer (UCLA, 2012). Cullen wrote her dissertation on the Jamaican-American master printer Robert Blackburn, who founded the Printmaking Workshop in New York in 1948. She was curator of the Printmaking Workshop Print Collection from 1993 to 1996, and arranged the acquisition of 2500 works from these holdings by the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
The 30th Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana will explore the idea of evolution, highlighting some of the transformations and underlying endurance the expanded graphic field has undergone over the last half-century. A renewed contemporary engagement with traditional means and the re-thinking of vintage processes and forms has invigorated the polygraphic terrain around the world.
“It’s a great honor to be asked to participate in the proud tradition of Ljubljana, and to focus on how graphic processes continue to invigorate the contemporary field,” Cullen stated.
The producer of Ljubljana’s International Biennial of Graphic Arts is the International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC) in Ljubljana, a museum specializing in the art of printing, artists’ books and ephemera. If we consider the history of the Ljubljana Biennial from today’s perspective, we could say that one of its greatest assets is that it presented current art from both West and East during the Iron Curtain period. Gradually, as part of the non-aligned policy that was the key pillar of Tito’s Yugoslavia, virtually the entire world took part in it. Artists from the USA, Western Europe and the countries of the Eastern Bloc, as well as—very unusual for the time—artists from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, all exhibited at the Ljubljana Biennial.
The year 2013 will see the 30th edition of the International Biennial of Graphic Arts, which has, particularly during the last twelve years, refreshed its concept, actualised as well as expanded the field of the graphic arts as a medium, and re-examined its structure time and again.
Organizer:
Mednarodni grafični likovni center / International Centre of Graphic Arts
Grad Tivoli, Pod turnom 3, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
T + 386 (0)1 2413800 / www.mglc-lj.si
Press contact:
Lili Šturm: T + 386 (0)1 2413818 / lili.sturm [at] mglc-lj.si
