Cristina Velásquez: El Nuevo Mundo

May 1 - August 17, 2024
Assembly, 3302 Canal Street, Houston, TX

Assembly is pleased to present a selection of works by Colombian and Texas-based artist Cristina Velásquez from her series El Nuevo Mundo (The New World). The works presented expand upon the artist’s inquiry into the photographic gaze against issues of identity, history, and colonialism through photographs, in conversation with her work in weaving made with cardboard.

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“The New World” as a designation for the Americas, originated in sixteenth-century Europe during the so-called age of discovery. Four centuries later, the term still evokes a combination of idealistic optimism and strategic exploitation. Cristina Velásquez questions this legacy from the perspective of her native Colombia. Deploying the concept of mestizaje, or the mixing of different ethnicities and cultures, Velásquez combines photography (a new medium) with weaving (an ancient method). Neither is privileged: weaving lends texture and dimension to photography, and photography adds representational detail to weaving. Velásquez produces objects that are overtly manual in origin, asking the viewer to think about labor—her own, and also that of Latin American people across the history of colonialism—as her true subject. Rather than illustrating working bodies in a conventionally documentary way, Velásquez frequently depicts isolated limbs in stylized, almost sculptural arrangements. These photographs are collaborative stagings of bodies in landscapes. In another form of mestizaje, they blend categories of genre and tone. Serious in intent and exacting in terms of craftsmanship, Velásquez’s “New World” is also animated by a sense of absurdity and joyous color. The artist’s approach is not didactic or propagandistic, but delivers its social and historic message via performance, engaging the viewer in the game of questioning, revision, and revelation.

— Britt Salvesen, Curator and Head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and the Prints and Drawings Department at LACMA

Cristina Velásquez (Colombian, b. 1985) is an artist working primarily with photography and weaving. Her work examines postcolonial structures of power in Latin America, such as race, class, and labor distribution. She is interested in the way one culture translates another, and how inevitably, a dominant culture sanitizes and reduces the other in a subtle, and not so subtle, continuity of colonialism. Velásquez’s work resists this legacy from the perspective of her native Colombia. Most recent recognitions include Regeneration 4, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne (2020); the Light Work Artist-In-Residence program (2019); the Carol Crow Fellowship (2019); and the Kris Graves Projects, Lost II Book Prize (2019). Velásquez's work has been shown widely including exhibitions at Musée de l’Elysée, ICP Museum, ArtBo, MoMA PS1, International Center of Photography, and Houston Center for Photography, in addition to being held in numerous private and public collections.