Transcommunality: Laura Anderson Barbata

By Claire Fenton

The Cornell Fine Arts Museum, in Winter Park, is presenting “Transcommunality: Laura Anderson Barbata, Collaboration Beyond Borders,” a show that documents the work of Mexican-born, New York-based artist Laura Anderson Barbata who is one of her homeland’s most distinguished mid-career artists. Anderson Barbata currently lives and works between New York and Mexico City, where she is Professor at the Escuela Nacional de Escultura, Pintura y Grabado La Esmeralda of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes.

Laura Anderson Barbata in collaboration with the Brooklyn Jumbies, Intervention: Wall Street, 2011. Financial District, New York. Photo: Frank Veronsky. Courtesy of the artist.

“Transcommunality” focuses on the decade-long project she pursued with stilt-walking communities in Trinidad and Tobago, Mexico, and Brooklyn. “The Transcommunality exhibition aims to connect various cultures through the platform of contemporary art in order to initiate collaborations, exchange, and knowledge. Through this exercise of shared experiences and cultures, we are able to recognize and value each tradition as its own manifestation, which connects us to the past while projecting us towards a future in which all voices have a place and are supported by each other,” says the artist. The show includes dynamic costumes, stilts, maquettes, videos, and photographs that relate her commitment to performance, social practice, and her long-term engagement with distinctive creative communities.

Laura Anderson Barbata in collaboration with the Brooklyn Jumbies, Spontaneous intervention, Soho/Chinatown, New York, 2008. Photo: Frank Veronsky. Courtesy of the artist.

“Transcommunality” highlights the vitality of the moko jumbie stilt-walking tradition and demonstrates the possibility of using this storied art form as a platform for social contemporary performance, group participation, and protest. The word “moko” is derived from the name of an African deity, and “jumbie” is a West Indian word for “spirit” or “ghost.” Amy Galpin, Curator of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum comments, “For fifteen years, I have been following the work of Laura Anderson Barbata. It is an honor to share her Transcommunality project with Central Florida. Anderson Barbata’s imaginative and ethereal works included in this exhibition are the result of powerful collaborations between distinctive communities and suggest both the perseverance and evolution of tradition.”

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Laura Anderson Barbata in collaboration with Los Zancudos de Zaachila and the Brooklyn Jumbies. Performance for San Pedro festivities, 2011. Zaachila, Oaxaca. Photo: Marco Pacheco. Courtesy of the artist.

Prior to her decade-long projects with stilt-walking communities, Anderson Barbata worked with the Yanomami community living in the Venezuelan Amazon Rainforest, where she created art projects that addressed several needs: for Yanomami to document their own history, to develop an ecological method of recycling obsolete books and paper refuse, and to create new means of revenue without disturbing their cultural and ecological environment. Anderson Barbata’s transdisciplinary work has received grants and awards from the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes and FONCA, Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and Arts. Since 1992 she has worked primarily in the social realm, and has initiated projects in the Amazon of Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, Norway, the United States, and Mexico. Among her most well-known projects is The Repatriation of Julia Pastrana, which involved the return of Ms. Pastrana for burial in her homeland of Mexico. Anderson Barbata is currently developing an opera in collaboration with Apparatjik and the National Opera and Ballet of Norway. Her work is included in numerous private and public collections, among them, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; and Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, Germany.

Laura Anderson Barbata in collaboration with artisans from Oaxaca, Stilts, 2012, carved and painted wood, using the traditional alebrije tradition of San Martín Tilcajete. Photo: Marco Pacheco. Courtesy of the artist.

This exhibition has previously been presented at the Centro de las Artes de Nuevo León, Monterrey; Museo de la Ciudad de México, México, D.F.; Museo Textil de Oaxaca, México; BRIC House, Brooklyn, NY; and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“Transcommunality: Laura Anderson Barbata, Collaboration Beyond Borders” is on view through April 10, 2016. The Cornell Fine Arts Museum is located at Rollins College Campus. 1000 Holt Avenue, Winter Park, FL 32789 / www.rollins.edu/cfam. For more information visit, www.lauraandersonbarbata.com

Claire Fenton is an arts writer based in Jacksonville.