The Catherwood Project by Leandro Katz
Program: “Incidents of Travel”
September 8, 2016, 4–8:30pm

Storefront for Art and Architecture and Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros present “Indicents of Travel,” a one-day program focusing on The Catherwood Project by Leandro Katz. “Incidents of Travel” is presented at Storefront’s gallery as part of its Reading Images Series and the collection’s Viewing Room initiative.

The illustrated publications documenting John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood’s expeditions in the Maya region, undertaken from 1839 to 1842, caused a commotion during the 19th century. These have since inspired archeologists, historians and artists, as well as explorers and travelers of all walks of life, who have developed further work taking their cue from their predecessors’ itineraries, narratives, and images. One such case is the Argentinian artist Leandro Katz (b. 1938). Starting in 1984 and for the span of several years, Katz undertook numerous trips to Mexico and Central America, retracing and eventually completing the expedition itineraries of Stephens and Catherwood. His ensuing artwork, The Catherwood Project, dated 1985–95, is a visual reconstruction of those expeditions, portraying an updated image of the ancient edifices first drawn by Catherwood, and, in the process, exploring the colonial gaze and postcolonial perspectives.

For this one-day event, a series of photographs from The Catherwood Project by Katz is on public display for an afternoon, and the 1844 book of lithographs Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan by Catherwood will be available for browsing. Then, in the evening, a program of succinct presentations takes place: art historian Julia Herzberg, who organized an exhibition of Katz’s work a decade ago at El Museo del Barrio, explains the artist’s project; curator Eugenie Tsai relates Robert Smithson’s Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan (1969) to Katz’s project; poet David Shapiro reads from Incidents of Travel in Poetry (2016) by the late Frank Lima; artist and educator Lize Mogel and John Emerson provide a map of expeditions in the Maya region carried out by Katz, Stephens and Catherwood.

“Incidents of Travel” is the fifth episode of Viewing Room, an itinerant program focusing on recent acquisitions of the contemporary art collection of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC). This episode is co-presented with Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. Organized by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, curator of contemporary art at CPPC, with artist Alejandro Cesarco, Viewing Room consists of a series of events in New York City in which a single artwork from the collection is put on display with an accompanying public program. Audiences are invited to experience seminal yet rarely seen artworks, and to participate in programs designed to help discern the processes and contexts in which these were created.

Earlier episodes of Viewing Room featured Secrets of the Amazon—Tomo River, 2011, by Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves (Peru), with a lecture by Paulo Tavares; The Fountain of Prosperity, 2006, by Michael Stevenson (New Zealand), with a panel including Lauren Cornell, Jason Farago and Michael Taussig; Looting, 2010, by Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), with a lecture performed by Mark Beasley and Arto Lindsay; and, A Voyage or ‘With the MS Remscheid on the Amazon’ or the Account of a Voyage Under the Stars of the Refrigerator, 1968–1972, by Lothar Baumgarten (Germany), with an artist’s talk moderated by Thomas Bartscherer.

With offices in New York and Caracas, the mission of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros is to enhance appreciation of the diversity, sophistication, and range of art from Latin America; advance scholarship of Latin American art; and promote excellence in visual-arts education. Its art collection is organized in five different sections: ethnographic (Orinoco), colonial, traveler-artists, modern, and contemporary.

Storefront for Art and Architecture advances innovative and critical ideas at the intersection of architecture, art, and design. Storefront’s exhibitions, events, competitions, publications, and projects provide alternative platforms for dialogue and collaboration across disciplinary, geographic, and ideological boundaries. Since its founding in 1982, Storefront has presented the work of over one thousand architects and artists.