Artspeak Radio with Lucía Vidales and Christopher Leitch

Artspeak Radio, Wednesday, September 18, 2024, 9am -10am CST, 90.1fm KKFI Kansas City Community Radio, streaming live audio www.kkfi.org

Producer/host Maria Vasquez Boyd welcomes guest co-host Christopher Leitch and artist Lucía Vidales.

Lucía Vidales: Hambre
9th Annual Atrium Project
September 20, 2024–July 13, 2025

LUCÍA VIDALES is a painter who lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. She is currently an art professor at University UDEM and has been awarded three times with the Jovenes Creadores grant by the Secretaría de Cultura, Mexico. Vidales’s layered paintings engage themes of materiality, the body, and the consequences of historical and colonial imaginaries. The beings that populate her paintings suggest the potential for confrontation, but seldom follow through. Instead they play with humor or anxiety, or seek consolation from ancient wounds.

About the Atrium Project
This annual commissioned installation presents the work of emerging and mid-career Hispanic and Latinx artists, often providing an opportunity for artists to push their work into ambitious areas of exploration in subject and/or scale. Past projects are by José Lerma, Firelei Báez, Paul Henry Ramirez, Angel Otero, Joiri Minaya, Aliza Nisenbaum, Pepe Mar, and Sarah Zapata.
“The first time I lived in an international context, I noticed that Latinos and Latin Americans stayed long after meals to chat, have coffee, dessert, a drink, or a smoke at a leisurely pace. In Mexico, where I live, as in other parts of Latin America, mealtime and after-dinner conversations are culturally very important and privileged spaces for social life. The time spent cooking, preparing meals and all the activities that go into preparing a gathering are what is usually considered in the realm of female activities, and often part of unseen and unacknowledged labor. Those are also spaces for building close connections, solidarity, and enjoyment, gossip, confessions, and skill building.” –
Lucía Vidales

Lucía Vidales (b. 1986, Mexico City) uses drawing and painting to explore and expand traditional art subjects. Her installation Hambre at Kemper Museum, commissioned for Kemper Museum’s ninth annual Atrium Project, will reinterpret the subject of the Last Supper, reflecting on both historical and modern dinner scenes. Reflecting on the significance of mealtime in Latin America, Vidales highlights its social and cultural significance, as vital gatherings for community building, yet often involve unrecognized female labor.
In Hambre, meaning “hunger,” Vidales layers charcoal drawings of multiple silhouetted figures behind a painting of guests at a table, connecting the roles of chefs and servers with the diners. The 2024 Atrium Project expands to fill the museum’s central core, featuring preparatory drawings for Hambre and Vidales’s mural-scale painting Viendo Desde El Monte Calvario (2020), which modernizes the depiction of the site of Jesus’s crucifixion. Both multi-panel works reflect spirituality, community, and Vidales’s desire to broaden audiences to the nuances of iconic imagery and reconsider its evolution in meaning in contemporary contexts.

Hambre is organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Erin Dziedzic.
The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art is located at 4420 Warwick Blvd. KCMO 816.753.5784 www.kemperart.org

CHRISTOPHER LEITCH served as Assistant Dean at Kansas City Art Institute. He was a consulting curator with the Center for Creative Studies, University of Missouri-Kansas City, and he was director of Kansas City Museum. Christopher has been a visiting lecturer and instructor at many schools across the United States.
Christopher earned an MA in Visual Arts from Goddard College in Vermont and a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute. He also attended the University of Oklahoma for three years. Christopher’s art works have been widely exhibited and toured, and his writings have been published in ArtPapers Atlanta, New Art Examiner and Ceramics: Art and Perception. Christopher was lead author of “LGBTQ Welcoming Guidelines for Museums: developing a resource for the museum field” in Museums and Social Issues, and he is a contributing author with Renae Youngs to companion article, “Diversity in Museum Hiring” for Museum Magazine. Christopher has presented papers for the American Alliance of Museums, Alliance of Midwest Museums, the Hall Center for the Humanities, and the Canadian Museums Association. More information at: www.christopherleitchstudio.net

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