Artists in Conversation: Sula Bermudez-Silverman and Christina Coleman

Christina Coleman works in sculpture, drawing and installation, incorporating forms and materials from African-American hair care to suggest the malleability of data as it pertains to social structures. Her exhibition, positive images, is currently on view in The Courtyard Gallery in the AT&T Hotel and Conference Center. Sula Bermudez-Silverman works in sculpture, frequently returning to elements of textile production, to address the relationship between constructions of the self, family, and society. Her work is on view in the exhibition Sutures at the Visual Arts Center. Join the artists in a discussion of the their explorations of material, abstraction, representation, and the politics of identity, moderated by Sutures curator Lilia Rocio Taboada.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Sutures, on view November 2 – December 7.

Bios

Sula Bermudez-Silverman was born in New York and raised in Los Angeles, California. She earned her M.F.A. in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art in 2018 and her B.A. in Studio Art from Bard College in 2015. She also studied at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and Design in London in 2013. Bermudez-Silverman is the recipient of the Susan H. Whedon Award (2018), the Nancy and Harry Koenigsberg Scholarship Award (2018), and the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship (2017). In 2015, she was an Honorary Artist-in-Residence at Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. 

Christina Coleman is a visual artist working in sculpture, drawing, and installation. Utilizing various materials ranging from commercial hair products to traditional fine art tools, Coleman works through subjects including the body, space, identity, and abstraction. She holds a B.A. from the University of California at Los Angeles and an M.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin. In the summer of 2011, she was an artist-in-residence at the Contemporary Artists Center at Woodside in Troy, NY. From 2016 to 2017, she served as co-curator at de stijl | PODIUM FOR ART, a gallery in central Austin. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in Central Texas, most recently including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center, The First Horizons of Juno at MASS Gallery, and A Spatial Continuum in Black at Texas A&M International University.

Lilia Rocio Taboada is currently pursuing her M.A. in the Department of Art & Art History at UT Austin with a focus on African American and Latinx art history after 1945. Prior to attending UT Austin, Taboada held Curatorial Internships at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her essay, “A Ripple Effect: Sherrill Roland,” was included in the Studio Museum in Harlem exhibition catalogue Fictions published in 2017. She earned her B.A. in World Arts and Cultures in 2016 from the University of California, Los Angeles. While at UCLA, Taboada was an inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellow at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and a Student Educator at the Hammer Museum.