The Holland Project’s Curator Series invites regional & national artist-curators to organize art and humanities programs in collaboration with HP Galleries. The series aims to expand the scope of conversations presented by curators and exhibiting artists beyond our gallery walls through programs that engage all departments of our organization: art, music, workshops, and community.
We are thrilled to announce the 2023 resident curators:
M Jiang + X Lee | Cesar Piedra + Geovany Uranda | John L’Etoile + Sandra Peña
More information about exhibition openings and related programming coming soon
2023 LIBRARY ARCHIVE
This series is made possible in part through a grant from Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities
MAY 8 – JUNE 17
M JIANG + ***X LEE
M Jiang is an artist-maker born & raised in Reno, NV. After graduating with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and living in NYC for 2 years, M returned to Reno to work on an experimental film in response to the rapid wave of gentrification that demolished many beloved watering holes of the DIY scene they grew up in & to document the energetic underground culture that has emerged despite these challenges.
They are attracted to mediums that engage their hands – such as colored pencil drawings, paper making, and tattooing, and mediums that deal with time – such as animation, video, and music. Surrealism provides a liberated space to explore the discomforts of living in a politicized body. The desert appears often in their drawing and animation work as a space that allows them to scavenge, build, and de/encode semiotic messages in a familiar landscape. Their early animation & drawing work dealt with the struggle of existing between worlds without a legible identity, but they have since found solitude in resisting identification, recognizing that though identity can provide a sense of belonging, it functions mainly as a social-political constraint. They build upon the available materials of their immediate surroundings to identify the space & time they inhabit, working with industrial debris, found objects, and secondhand materials.
***X Lee is a self-taught antidisciplinary artist working in reno, nevada, formerly based in new york city. They make work that could be called sculptural collage, video/sound collage, performance art, experimental exchange + fashion design. Their practice combines pre-authored, found and reused materials to disturb the machinations of dominant american/white european historical narratives, along with whiteness’s claims to innocence and purity and its insistence on (self)preservation. Their work is infected and inflected by the conditions of the faux-progressive late-capitalist surveillance state they find themselves living under. By picking up the cultural and industrial detritus left to disappear into the unseen landfills of our planet and our memory, they reconstruct, readjust, reroute and remaneuver in the forever quest to crack the cosmic puzzle, escape this world if not destroy it, and help others do the same. They’ve shown art in tokyo, seoul, new york city and los angeles in both conventional and unconventional gallery settings.
JULY 11 – AUGUST 25
CESAR PIEDRA + GEOVANY URANDA
Cesar Piedra is an interdisciplinary artist based in Reno, NV. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Nevada Reno in 2021. His practice is influenced by contemporary and mesoamerican cultures. Piedra’s works have been exhibited across galleries in Nevada, such as The Marjorie Barrick and Lilley Museums, CCAI Courthouse Gallery, and the Holland Project. Piedra’s curatorial practice is based on conversations with his contemporaries, where they riff on a subject and get excited about the proposed content and the addition of fellow artist and their contribution to the conversation. This method of organization has produced two prior exhibitions The Burrito Show with Pax Robinson, and Hijo’s de Suu- with Häsler Gomez.
Geovany Uranda (he/they) is a Las Vegas Chicano artist exploring the mediums of muralism, design, and sculpture. He is currently attending the University of Las Vegas, NV (UNLV) and working towards a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture and drawing/painting/printmaking. He has participated in multiple group exhibitions and collaborated on several projects including the design of “The ABCs of Latindad Coloring Book” for the podcast Latinos Who Lunch. His most recognized piece was the large-scale mural, Tres Fases, which was displayed at UNLV’s Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art’s exhibition Future Relics: Artifacts for a New World curated by GULCH Collective. Another large-scale work, This is Fine, was installed in the desert near the ghost town of Rhyolite for the 2nd Bullfrog Biennial at the Goldwell Open Air Museum and Red Barn Art Center and performatively installed in various parts of Las Vegas as signs of protest. He recently completed the mural, Nuestras Mascaras, in Eastside Las Vegas near where he grew up.
OCTOBER 17 – DECEMBER 1
JOHN L’ETOILE + SANDRA PEÑA
John L’Etoile is a photographer and videographer based in Reno, Nevada. His work includes documentary and music photography along with directing and filming music videos. Distilling time through the medium of photography to let moments, people, and places live on for longer than they were destined is his main goal. The creation of cultural artifacts and making human stories accessible for future generations is at the forefront of his methodology when making photographs.
Sandy Peña is a digital artist from Las Vegas, NV. She’s attracted to immersive video and animation that reevaluates our relationship to physical space and how we distinguish the digital from the real. Through her own work, she hopes the world-building and measured nature of frame-by-frame media allow others to examine control and performance within their own lives. She received a BA in Digital Media with a minor in Journalism from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2021. She’s currently a video editor and content creator for PBS Reno.