PRESS RELEASE
THE POINT OF CONTACT GALLERY
914 East Genesee St.
Syracuse, NY 13210
Tel: 315.443.2169
GALLERY OPEN: Monday through Friday, 9am to 4pm, or by appointment.
Guided visits welcome.
Tango is a grand format folio published by Iris Editions in New York (1991), with eight intaglio prints by Nancy Graves and thirteen pages of text by Pedro Cuperman, which gaze at the aesthetics of this Latin American dance.
Nancy Graves (1940-1995) American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and filmmaker is known for her focus on natural phenomena. Graves' most famous sculpture, Camels, was first displayed in the Whitney Museum of American Art, making her the first woman to have a solo exhibition there. In 1974, she was part of a show titled American Art in Upstate New York, which came to the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, among several others around the region.
Pedro Cuperman is the Point of Contact gallery’s curator; founder and editor of the Point of Contact journal on the verbal and visual arts since 1975, and an Associate Professor of Spanish, Latin American literature, critical theory, and semiotics at the Department of Languages Literatures & Linguistics, Syracuse University. A close friend of the late sculptor, Cuperman wrote extensively in Nancy Graves: Icons of Language (Wetterling Gallery, Gothenburg, Sweden; catalogue, 1990): “With Nancy Graves, distance is syntax. What appears as chaotic stream, heterogeneous and arbitrary, coalesces as metaphor: a visualized plenum.”
About the Tango piece produced in collaboration by Graves and Cuperman, Thomas Padon writes in his book, NANCY GRAVES, Excavations in Print—A Catalogue Raisonné (1996): “Graves conceived of the prints in the folio as a continued exploration of pattern in nature and as a tonal study of black and white. More than once the artist has asserted, ‘There is nothing more challenging and meaningful than to make prints in black and white.’ For an admitted colorist, it is ironic that the nine prints Graves has made in black and white are among her most powerful. The cryptic titles of the prints in the folio were selected by Graves from Cuperman's text for Tango. The poet speaks of the dance as a gradually unfolding ritual, stating near the conclusion, “Tango helps you find your own levels of proximity.”
The opening reception for this Point of Contact exhibit proposes an evening of music and dance, transposed into video—a sort of “performance” projected into the space of the gallery where audience and art become intertwined in the field of representation.
S.U. Professor and filmmaker Owen Shapiro, artistic director of the Syracuse International Film Festival and Associate Editor of Point of Contact, will be in charge of the video section of the installation. While recording, the uncut video will be projected inside and outside the Point of Contact Gallery space.
A renowned Miami-based Tango instrumentalist and composer, Maestro Miguel Arrabal, will play the classic bandoneón at the opening reception while Vatan & Georgia from SyracuseTango along with Jean Fung from New York City’s Fun-Tango, will perform to the rhythms of the Maestro. Point of Contact welcomes tangueros from near and far to this one-time only extravaganza, where the space of the gallery and the sidewalks of East Genesee St. turn to dance floors.
Specially recreated recipes of the traditional Latin American empanadas and other picaditas and sangría will be concocted by Phoebe's executive chef and co-owner, Chris Kuhns.
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The Point of Contact Gallery is a member of the Coalition of Museum and Art Centers (CMAC) at S.U.
Punto de Contacto/Point of Contact, Inc. is a non-profit, 501c3 tax-exempt organization dedicated to the exploration and exchange of ideas in the verbal and visual arts. The corporation is dedicated to publishing as well as producing and documenting special events that are generated in collaboration with Syracuse University and the artistic and intellectual community locally, nationally and internationally.