Sula Bermudez-Silverman: Sutures
Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Portraits of family members using DNA testing results, 2016–ongoing. Embroidery on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.
Sutures features the work of artist Sula Bermudez-Silverman and surveys her long-term practice of portraiture. Bermudez-Silverman mines her own family lineage and image archive to convey the complexities of identification, in particular the role and interplay of religion, race, ethnicity, and nationality. The works featured in the exhibition attest to the tension between inherent versus constructed identity. Underlying Sutures are elements of textile sculpture, with artworks woven, sewn, crocheted, spun, and embroidered alongside the use of found and cast materials. Bermudez-Silverman’s recent venture into video work further pushes the boundaries of portraiture as the abstracted bodies of her and her family command space beyond the traditional edges of the frame. In Sutures, Bermudez-Silverman challenges societal pressures to categorize the self, instead displaying her and her family’s identities as expansive and inextricably-linked.
This exhibition is organized by Lilia Rocio Taboada, MA candidate in Art History. It is supported by Center Space Project, the Art Galleries at Black Studies, the Center for Mexican American Studies, the Center for Latin American Visual Studies (CLAVIS), and the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies.
Bio
Sula Bermudez-Silverman was born in New York and raised in Los Angeles, California. She earned her MFA in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art in 2018 and her BA 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.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Lilia Rocio Taboada is currently pursuing her MA 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 BA 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.