Synopses & Reviews
For more than a decade the Mexico City-based artist, architect, and cultural agent Pedro Reyes has been turning existing social problems into opportunities for effecting tangible change through collective imagination. By breaking open failed models and retooling them with space to project alternatives, Reyes's art enables productive diversions of otherwise destructive forces.
Ad Usum, To Be Used is the second volume in the series Focus on Latin American Art and Agency, which is dedicated to contemporary cultural agents, a term that is perhaps best understood through the words of Reyes himself: "changing our individual habits has no degree of effectiveness" as "progress is only significant if you start to multiply by 10, by 100, by 1,000." Rather than merely illustrate his work, this collection of images, interviews, and critical essays is intended as an apparatus for multiplying the possibilities when art becomes a resource for the common good.
This full-color illustrated survey of Reyes's projects includes critical essays by José Luis Falconi, Robin Greeley, Johan Hartle, Adam Kleinman, and Doris Sommer, as well as interviews between the artist and such seminal thinkers as Lauren Berlant, Michael Hardt, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Antanas Mockus.
Synopsis
Ad Usumis the catalogue of the retrospective exhibit of celebrated Mexican artist Pedro Reyes mounted at the Carpenter Center and organized by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.
This is the first volume entirely dedicated to the works of Reyes, who is considered to be one of the most innovative and radical young Mexican artists.
Comprehensive in its scope, the volume covers all the production of Reyes' career from the mid-1990s until the present--starting with the celebrated series of semi-utopian architectural structures, passing through his performance and video pieces of the early 2000s, and culminating with the collaborative projects in which he has been engaged in recent years.
This volume includes interviews by the artist with Antanas Mockus, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Augusto Boal, critical texts by Doris Sommer, Ute Meta Bauer (MIT), and the exhibit's curator, Josandeacute; Falconi.
Synopsis
Mexico-based artist, architect, and cultural agent Pedro Reyes turns existing social problems into opportunities for effecting tangible change through collective imagination. Ad Usum, To Be Used is a full-color illustrated survey of Reyes's projects including images, interviews, and critical essays by leading scholars in diverse fields.
About the Author
Josandeacute; Luis Falconiis Art Forum Curator at the <>David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University.