Harold Mendez: The years now

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The 2020 exhibition Harold Mendez: The years now presented a suite of existing and newly commissioned works—including photography, sculpture and sound—by visual artist Harold Mendez at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. Mendez’s practice draws on artifacts and rituals from sites across the Americas, spanning from pre-Columbian times to the present, to create poetic assemblages that connect histories of violence and erasure with acts of renewal and remembrance. Building on a process-driven approach, in The years now, the artist employed various techniques such as digital scanning, three-dimensional printing, photo transfer, and sonic amplifications to explore the apparitions of bodies, and the ego across materials, site, and memory.

Featuring installation views and research material, this volume is the first substantial monograph dedicated to the artist’s work. This publication includes a foreword by director and curator Yesomi Umolu, contributions from scholar and curator Candice Hopkins and poet J. Michael Martinez, and an interview with Mendez and curator Katja Rivera.

Contributor Bio(s)

Yesomi Umolu is exhibitions curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago. She oversees a program of international contemporary art in the Logan Center Gallery and contributes to a number of strategic committees that drive the development of contemporary art, architecture, and urbanism on campus. In addition to her curatorial role, Umolu is a lecturer in the university's Humanities Division.
Umolu's recent curatorial projects at the Logan Center include Candice Lin: A Hard White Body, a Porous Slip (2018), Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machado: Divine Violence (2017), Kapwani Kiwanga: The sum and its parts (2017) and So-called Utopias (2015). She served as artistic director of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial and she is a 2016 recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellowship.
Umolu was a member of the curatorial advisory board for the United States Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, commissioned by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. She currently sits on the board of trustees of the Graham Foundation, Chicago.

Harold Mendez has taken part in numerous exhibitions, including Being: New Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York. In addition, his work has been shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Bass Museum, Miami; LAXART, Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; MoMA PS1, New York; the Renaissance Society, Chicago; Project Row Houses, Houston; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among other venues. His work has been reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Artforum, and Frieze. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Headlands Center for the Arts; and the Tamarind Institute, and is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant; the Illinois Arts Council Agency Artist Fellowship; the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship; and the 3Arts Award. Mendez studied at Columbia College Chicago; the University of Science and Technology, School of Art, Ghana, West Africa; and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is currently based in Los Angeles.

Candice Hopkins is senior curator of the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art; co-curator of the 2018 SITE Santa Fe biennial, Casa Tomada; and part of the curatorial team for Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, Germany. She also co-curated the major exhibitions Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, various venues; and the 2014 SITElines biennial, Unsettled Landscapes, Santa Fe. Her writing has been published widely; recent essays and presentations include "Outlawed Social Life" for South as a State of Mind magazine and Sounding the Margins: A Choir of Minor Voices, Small Projects, Tromsø, Norway. She has lectured internationally, including at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Tate Modern, Dak'Art: African Contemporary Art Biennale, Artists Space, Tate Britain, and the University of British Columbia. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art and the Foundation Prince Pierre de Monaco's 2016 Prix pour un essai critique sur l'art contemporain. She is a citizen of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation.

J. Michael Martinez is the author of three collections of poetry. Long-listed for the National Book Award, he is a winner of the National Poetry Series and a recipient of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has published with various outlets, including PBS, The Poetry Society of America's New American Poets series, New American Writing, and POETRY magazine. He is the poetry editor at Noemi Press and his writings have been anthologized in Ahsahta Press' The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, Rescue Press' The New Census: 40 American Poets, and Counterpath Press' Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing. A visiting assistant professor of poetry at St. Lawrence University, Canton, Martinez lives in upstate New York.

Katja Rivera is a Chicago-based art historian and curator. She was formerly assistant curator, Logan Center Exhibitions at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago, where she curated the exhibition Harold Mendez: The years now. Her recent curatorial projects include Traduttore, Traditore (Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago), which explored translation beyond its linguistic meaning in contemporary practices. Rivera has worked in curatorial departments at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, and at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she helped organize the first U.S. solo-presentation of the Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral. Rivera holds an MA in art history from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She specializes in modern and contemporary art with a focus on experimental practices in Mexico.