Arthur Bispo do Rosario, Untitled (Grande Veleiro), n.d., Wood, plastic, fabric foam, metal, ink, graphite, paper, found materials, thread, fiber, nylon, 46 ½ x 62 ¼ x 25 ½ inches, courtesy of Museu Bispo do Rosario Arte Contemporânea. Photo credit: Alex Mota
Arthur Bispo do Rosario wearing his work Manto da apresentação (Annunciation garment), pictured in a photographic essay, Revista O Cruzeiro (The Cruzeiro Magazine), 1943, Photo: Jean Manzon
OAF Talks | A Chess Game With Bispo do Rosario
Monday, February 27, 5pm
The Americas Society, 680 Park Ave, New York, NY
20 West 29th Street, New York
Click to RSVP (essential, capacity strictly limited)
Like many other psychiatric patients, self-taught visionaries, or mediums who make art on the margins of society, Arthur Bispo do Rosario felt the need to create an artistic language of his own in order to reveal what he understood to be the true nature of things after experiencing a life-changing epiphany. A meeting with a supernatural divine power drove Bispo do Rosario from chaos to order, opening also for him “doors of perception” to a transcendental reality that helped him survive the hardships of many years of psychiatric institutionalization. Like other visionary artists without any previous artistic training, such as Adolf Wölfli and Henry Darger, Bispo do Rosario dedicated his life obsessively to the creation of complex visual representations that employed text and images to create a new world.
Writer, curator and editor Edward M. Gómez, and Bispo do Rosario: All Existing Materials on Earth co-curator Javier Téllez will discuss Bispo do Rosario's oeuvre.
Javier Téllez is a Venezuela-born, NYC-based artist and curator. His work brings peripheral communities and invisible situations to the fore of contemporary art and often involves people diagnosed with mental illness to produce film installations that question the notions of the normal and the pathological. He has had solo exhibitions at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester (2018), San Francisco Art Institute (2014), Kunsthaus Zürich (2014), Stedelijk Museum (2013), Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2011), The Bronx Museum of the Arts (2005), and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2004). He has curated projects such as Los de arriba y los de abajo at Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City (2009), Hommage to K.F. Drenthe. Works from the collection of Dr. Guislain Museum at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst in Ghent (2013), and The Doors of Perception in collaboration with The Outsider Art Fair for Frieze New York (2019). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999 and the Global Mental Health Award for Innovation in the Arts from Columbia University in 2016.
Edward M. Gómez is a multilingual, international arts journalist, critic, curator, translator, and graphic designer. The founder and editor in chief of the magazine brutjournal, he is a member of the advisory council of the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland. The former senior editor of Raw Vision, he has written and provided original photography for that magazine and for The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Art & Antiques, ARTnews, Art in America, The Japan Times, Nikkei Asia, Metropolis, ARTnews, Art in America, Art + Auction, Gagosian Quarterly, and many other publications. He is the author or co-author of numerous books, including, among them, The New Design Series (Rockport), Dictionnaire de la civilisation japonaise (Hazan Éditions), Yes: Yoko Ono (Abrams), The Art of Adolf Wölfli: St. Adolf-Giant-Creation (American Folk Art Museum/Princeton University Press), Hans Krüsi (Iconofolio), As Things Appear (Ballena Studio), Art Brut du Japon, un autre regard / Art Brut from Japan, Another Look (Collection de l'Art Brut / 5 Continents, 2018). With Chris Shields, in 2017, he produced the film Valton Tyler: Flesh Is Fiction (Ballena Studio).
