Tamarind Talks: Harold Mendez and Candice Hopkins in conversation

Join us for a conversation between recent Tamarind artist-in-residence Harold Mendez and curator and writer Candice Hopkins. The two will discuss cultural ideas of ritual, visibility, and the body as revealed in Mendez’s work as well as the two editions he created in the Tamarind workshop.

Harold Mendez has participated in several significant exhibitions, including Being: New Photography (2018), the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York. In January of 2020 he presented a solo exhibition, The years now at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago and his ten year career survey, Let us gather in a flourishing way is currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In addition, Mendez’s work has been the subject of exhibitions 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. 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 Light Work. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Studio Museum in Harlem; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the J.P. Morgan Chase Art Collection; Minneapolis Institute of Art; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; and the Colección Diéresis, Guadalajara, Mexico. Mendez studied at Columbia College Chicago; the University of Science and Technology, School of Art, Ghana; and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Forthcoming projects for 2021 include museum solo exhibitions at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Richmond; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Arts/Industry Residency. He is currently based in Los Angeles.

Photo credit: Harold Mendez at Tiffany Hollowware workshop for 2017 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art.

Candice Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her writing and curatorial practice explores the intersections of history, contemporary art and indigeneity. She works as senior curator for the 2019 and 2021 editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art and was part of the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale, featuring the work of the media art collective Isuma. She is co-curator of notable exhibitions including Art for New Understanding: Native Voices 1950s to Now; the 2018 SITE Santa Fe biennial, Casa Tomada; documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany; Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada and Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years in Winnipeg, MB. Her recent essays and presentations include “The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier,” for the documenta 14 Reader, and “Outlawed Social Life” for South as a State of Mind.