Liliana Porter: Blue and Black

Liliana Porter (b. Argentina, 1941, residing in New York since 1964) works across mediums with printmaking, painting, drawing, photography, video, installation, theater, and public art. Her latest exhibition, “Blue and Black,” continues the artist’s almost sixty-year exploration of the concept of continuity. Porter’s works engage the relationships between levity and seriousness, imagined and real, and historic and present, all through an open-minded approach to materiality and (art) historical references. Painting, sculpture, installation, found materials and objects communicate, collide, respect and respond to each other so as to provide meaningful and insightful, as well as playful, approaches to life’s daily and metaphysical issues.

Porter began showing her work in 1959 and has since been in over 450 exhibitions in 40 countries. Recent solo shows include those at El Museo del Barrio in New York City; The Perez Art Museum in Miami; ART OMI in Ghent, NY; Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, GA; El Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales in Montevideo; Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Franklin Rawson in San Juan, Argentina; and Museo de Arte de Zapopan in Guadalajara, Mexico. Porter’s work was featured in the traveling exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960 – 1985 at the Brooklyn Museum, NY and the Hammer in Los Angeles, CA. In 2017, Porter’s work was included in Viva Arte Viva, La Biennale di Venezia, 57th International Art Exhibition in Italy and she debuted “Domar al leon y otras dudas,” her third theatrical production, in June, 2018 at the 2nd Bienal de Performance, Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Porter’s most recent theatrical performance, “THEM” was co-directed with Ana Tiscornia with music by Sylvia Meyer. It debuted in New York at The Kitchen from October 25-26, 2018.

Additionally, Porter’s work has been exhibited at El Museo Tamayo, México DF; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the New Museum. The artist’s works are held in public and private collections, among which are TATE Modern, London; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Buenos Aires; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museo de Bellas Artes de Santiago; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Guggenheim Museum of Art, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Boston; Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogota, Museum of Fine Art, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and the Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zürich. Public art projects include those for NY’s MTA and Doménech Station in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Galleries in Europe, Latin America, and the United States represent the artist.

Liliana Porter’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, and Sculpture Magazine, among others. Monographs include Liliana Porter in Conversation with Inés Katzenstein, Liliana Porter: El hombre con el hacha y otras situaciones breves by Graciela Speranza, Liliana Porter: The Enemy e Outros Olhares Obliques by Montejo Navas, Liliana Porter: Fotografía y Ficción by Inés Katzenstein, Liliana Porter: Obra Gráfica, 1964-1990 by Mari Carmen Ramirez, Liliana Porter and The Art of Simulation by Florencia Nelson-Bazzano. Additionally, her work is featured in The New York Graphic Workshop: 1964-1970 by Gabriel Perez-Barreiro and Ursula Davila-Villa, From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969 – 74 by Cornelia Butler, and many more. Porter studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires and at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City before moving to New York, where in 1964, she co-founded the New York Graphic Workshop with artists Luis Camnitzer and Jose Guillermo Castillo. Porter was recognized with a 2016 Premio Universitario de Cultura 400 Años award from Universidad Nacional de Cordoba, Argentina; a 1980 Guggenheim Fellowship; three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (1985, 1996, 1999); the Mid Atlantic/NEA Regional Fellowship (1994); and seven PSC- CUNY research awards (from 1994 to 2004). She was a professor at Queens College, CUNY until 2007.