Conversation and Publication Launch: Sofía Córdova and Raquel Gutiérrez

Saturday, June 15, 3pm

Sofía Córdova, GUILLOTINÆ WannaCry, Green: Savage Sauvage Salvaje (still), 2022. Video, color, black and white, original sound composition, 34 min. 35 sec.

Join us on June 15th at 3pm for a conversation between artist Sofía Córdova and poet and writer Raquel Gutiérrez as part of Córdova’s exhibition, The Wreck and not the Story of the Wreck. 

They will speak about the works in the gallery and the artist’s research process, focusing on themes of collaboration, containment, and physical and conceptual borders.  

The program coincides with the launch of Córdova’s GUILLOTINÆ WannaCry, the second publication of JOAN’s imprint, Autograph Press, designed by The Rodina. GUILLOTINÆ WannaCry brings together the artist’s scripts, drawings, and images from the video works presented in the exhibition.

For more information on the project, see here.

Sofía Córdova lives and works between her native Puerto Rico and Oakland, California. Her work considers science fiction, climate change, migration, and revolution within the matrix of class, gender, race, late capitalism and its evolving technologies. Córdova works in performance, video, sound, music, installation, photography, and sometimes taxidermy. She is one half of the music duo, XUXA SANTAMARIA, with Matthew Gonzalez Kirkland. Her work has been exhibited and performed nationally and internationally at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tufts University Galleries, Boston, Massachusetts; the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Buffalo, New York; the Arizona State University Museum, Tempe, Arizona; the Vincent Price Museum, Los Angeles; SFMOMA, the Wattis Institute, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (all San Francisco); as well as the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Art Hub, Shanghai; and MEWO Kunsthalle, Memmingen, Germany. Córdova has participated in residencies at Eyebeam in New York; Headlands Center for the Arts and Mills College Museum in California; and the ASU Museum in Arizona; and choreographed performances for the SF Arts Commission and the Soundwave Biennial in San Francisco, and the Merce Cunningham Trust in New York. She is a recipient of a Fundación Ama Amoedo Grant, Creative Work Fund Grant, Artadia Award, and 2024 Creative Capital Award.

Raquel Gutiérrez is a critic, essayist, poet, performer, and educator born and raised in Los Angeles. Gutiérrez’s first book Brown Neon (Coffee House Press) was named as one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker and listed in The Best Art Books of 2022 by Hyperallergic. Brown Neon was a 2023 Finalist for the Lambda Literary Prize for Best Lesbian Biography/Memoir, a 2023 Finalist for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses’ Firework Award in Creative Nonfiction, and Recipient of The Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. A 2021 recipient of the Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism, as well as a 2017 recipient of the The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, Gutiérrez teaches in the Oregon State University-Cascades Low Residency Creative Writing MFA Program, as well as for The Institute of American Indian Arts’ (IAIA) Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing program. Gutiérrez gets to call Tucson, Arizona home.