ESTEBAN DEL VALLE (A '11)

INVISIBLE TYRANTS: FINDING THE MASTERS BEYOND THESE SHACKLES

In Invisible Tyrants: Finding the Masters Beyond These Shackles, Esteban del Valle addresses the hierarchal structures embedded in the conversation of privilege vs. accessibility and how it relates to notions of “good” and “bad” art: "Growing up as a graffiti artist and having never lost my love for painting walls and illustration, I have found myself split between two different “art worlds” with two different approaches to creativity. After watching a room full of my Skowhegan peers laugh and mock several painters I found myself relating to, I was forced to ask the question, 'Who is right in this situation?'”

Originally from Chicago, Esteban del Valle (A '11) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, where he maintains an active studio and mural practice. He completed his MFA in painting at RISD in 2009, where he received a Presidential Scholarship and the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship. Del Valle has produced murals nationally and his work has been featured on HGTV, NY1 News, News 12 Brooklyn, Huffington Post, and the New York Times and has been included in various exhibitions includingPulso: Art of the Americas at KCAD in Grand Rapids, MI, EMPIRIA at Superchief Gallery in NYC, Liars, Actors, and Believers at Cabinet in Brooklyn, NY. Del Valle has also been the recipient of several visual arts residencies and fellowships including Hub-Bub, ISLAND, the Djarssi Program, and the Fine Arts Work Center. He is currently a participant in Smack Mellon’s Artist Studio Program.

About the Series

This lecture series folds up and poofs out. It's theater. It's something else. It's ABOUT theater. It IS about itself. It moves over and under that line where the body meets language and where that same body asks, "How is it that I am this way?"

This lecture series lives under the umbrella of performance art, but collides with a certain kind of academic pursuit and presentation that plumbs boundaries of what "academic" is or might be. It lays claim to its own performativity – its writing - as a non-linear composition that may or may not have been written for us before we even showed up.

This lecture series hinges on the production of gender, theatricality and culture, as things that have NOT been exhausted by art production and NOT overtalked. "But isn't all art about those things?" These are totally self conscious and self-aware enactments and - should we say - pageants, in a framework of kindred ideas. We hope you will enjoy them. We hope you will enjoy them.

Pictured: P.I.C.T.U.R.E.S. a collaborative mural project in Brownsville, Brooklyn with Groundswell youth artists