Screening and Artist Talk with Hugo Crosthwaite
Artist Hugo Crosthwaite, winner of the fifth triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, speaks with Taína Caragol, curator of painting and sculpture and Latinx Art and History at the National Portrait Gallery, and co-curator of The Outwin: American Portraiture Today. Allowing the act of drawing to organically dictate his compositions in works that range from intimate drawings to large scale murals, Crosthwaite juxtaposes a wide range of textural and tonal ranges against spaces that alternate from dense and atmospheric to flat and graphic. His subjects—the everyday people that populate the border region of San Diego/Tijuana—are presented in a nonidealized documentary style that allows them to appear in their humble familiarity and authenticity.
Caragol will introduce the exhibition, and Crosthwaite will discuss his winning artwork, the stop-motion drawing animation A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez (2018). The animation will also be screened during the conversation.
This program is free, but registration is required.
About the speakers
Born in 1971 in Tijuana, Hugo Crosthwaite spent his formative years in Rosarito, Mexico. An American citizen with family on both sides of the border, he graduated from San Diego State University in 1997 with a BA in applied arts. Crosthwaite lives and works in San Diego and Rosarito. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Orange County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; San Diego Museum of Art; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA; Boca Raton Museum of Art, FL; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; The Progressive Art Collection; and numerous private collections around the world.
Taína Caragol is curator of painting and sculpture, and Latinx art and history at the National Portrait Gallery. Her scholarship focuses on Latinx and Latin American art and its institutional and market validation, as well as on the recovery of histories suppressed by colonialism. Since her hiring in 2013 she has significantly increased the representation of Latinx historical figures and artists at the Portrait Gallery through acquisitions for the museum’s permanent collection and by curating or co-curating exhibitions such as One Life: Dolores Huerta; UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light, Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar; and The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today. Upcoming shows include 1898: US Imperial Visions and Revisions, co-curated with Kate Clarke Lemay, and The Outwin 2022, which she will direct and co-curate with Leslie Ureña. Caragol has a BA in modern languages from the University of Puerto Rico, an MA in French studies from Middlebury College, and a PhD in art history from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Image credit
Hugo Crosthwaite, still from A Portrait of Berenice Sarmiento Chávez, 2018. Stop-motion drawing animation, 3:12 min. Collection of the artist, courtesy of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. © Hugo Crosthwaite.