George Mason University Libraries are excited to announce a new venture: the Mason Libraries Artist-in-Residence Program. For this pilot year, we’re excited to announce that Adriana Monsalve, an artist, photobook maker, and co-founder of Homie House Press, will join us in a research and visual arts project.
About the Residency
Exhibition: Diaspora Diction
Related Events
About the Artist
About the Residency
Throughout April and May 2019, Monsalve will be dividing her residency between the University Libraries (Fenwick Library, Special Collections Research Center, and Fenwick Gallery) and the Mason School of Art to lead a series of in-class lectures and workshops, and to conduct research in the library’s photobook and artists’ book collections. The residency will conclude with an exhibition curated by Monsalve and an artist’s talk, and in the publication of a collaborative zine produced by Mason students and faculty.
This residency is sponsored by the George Mason University Libraries, the Mason School of Art, and the Mason University Life Programming Fund.
Exhibition: Diaspora Diction
Diaspora Diction collects Monsalve’s photographs, photobooks, and ongoing research into identity—and illusions of identity—in the African and Latinx diaspora. The exhibition features images from Monsalve’s first photobook, Clear as Black, a deeply personal and investigative documentary of the community and stories of individuals with a rare type of albinism found in Puerto Rico. The exhibition also features images from also includes a second, separate body of work in progress, tentatively titled Novena. Photographed during a subsequent visit to Puerto Rico, Novena follows the family of Ricardito, one of subjects of Clear as Black, in the days immediately following the death of his grandfather, the family patriarch.
As part of her artist’s talk, Monsalve will discuss the works included in Diaspora Diction as well as the research conducted during her residency time at Mason, where she continues to explore questions of identity, expanding her scope to the Melungeon communities in Appalachia.
Learn more about Diaspora Diction on our exhibitions page.
Events & Workshops
Home in the Other: Photozine Workshop
Thursday, April 25, 10:30am – 1:00pm
Registration is free but required due to space. Sign up here!
Exhibition Talk & Opening Reception: Diaspora Diction
Tuesday, May 28, 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Fenwick Library Main Reading Room (Fenwick 2001, second floor)
About Adriana Monsalve:
I am a storyteller and visual communicator that produces in-depth stories on identity through the nuances in between. As a daughter of immigrants from the Caribbean Republic of Colombia, I have struggled with the concept of “home.” As immigrants, we are everywhere and we have to belong somewhere, so we’ve made habitats for ourselves in pocket towns of people like us. I’m documenting to show you something I’ve found and ultimately, something I am. I’m documenting so you know I was here.
I am an artist, book maker, and educator… but I am still reclaiming space. I am growing into the many things that were made for me at the intersection of personal, political, and poetic.
Adriana Monsalve is an artist and collaborative publisher working in the photobook medium. Together with Caterina Ragg, she runs Homie House Press from Beltsville, MD and Lambrate, Milano, Italy. HHP is a radical cooperative platform that challenges the ever-changing forms of storytelling with image + text.
Monsalve earned a Masters in Photojournalism from the University of Westminster, London in 2013. In 2018, she was awarded the Lucie Independent Photo Book Prize for her collaborative photo book, Femme Frontera, a project which was funded by the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and was part of the Master Artist Grant for 2017.
The works of Homie House Press have been collected in the Library of Congress, the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and Maryland Institute College of Art, among other private collections. At Mason, Monsalve’s photobooks and HHP publications are held in the Mason Libraries Artists’ Book Collection.
See more on Monsalve’s work and HHP at http://www.adrianastories.com.