2018 Events
Artemisa Clark: La clase de dibujo libre/Free Drawing Class (2000-2004/2017/2018)
La clase de dibujo libre/Free Drawing Class (2000-2004/2017/2018) by Artemisa Clark is a “reperformance” by Los Angeles-based artist Artemisa Clark of Ema Villanueva’s provocative Mexico City street actions from 2000-2002.
La clase de dibujo libre/Free Drawing Class was a series of life drawing classes in public plazas in Mexico City and elsewhere from 2000-2002, produced by Edema, a collaboration between Ema Villanueva and Eduardo Flores. During these performances, Villanueva posed as a nude model while simultaneously engaging in discussions with attendees about contemporary issues such as feminism and social justice—using the objectification of her own body as a means to bring attention to pressing topics of the day. Clark’s reperformance will consider Villanueva’s prior actions and offer another interpretation of the traditional role of “the model." Participants are encouraged to bring their own drawing supplies.
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Documentation from Villanueva’s original La clase de dibujo libre/Free Drawing Class can be seen in the Armory’s current exhibition Below the Underground: Renegade Art and Action in 1990s Mexico/Más abajo que el underground: arte renegado y acción en el México de los noventa., Part of Pacific Standard Time LA/LA.
About Artemisa Clark
Artemisa Clark is a Los Angeles-born and -based, Chicanx performance and media artist and Performance and Latinx Studies scholar. She received an MA in Performance Studies from Northwestern University in 2016 and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego in 2015. Clark's research and work explore the materiality of Latinx erasure on multiple scales and fronts, from the individual to the institutional. Rather than move on from these erasures, she relives and lingers in historic, cultural, and personal wounds while experimenting with embodied tactics for preserving these histories often left out of official narratives and archives. She has exhibited and presented research at CalArts, the Vincent Price Art Museum, Slanguage Studio, analog dissident, Angels Gate Cultural Center, and Commonwealth & Council, all in the Los Angeles area; the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics's Encuentro X in Santiago, Chile; and Bikini Wax in Mexico City. In 2017, she was nominated for the Los Angeles Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. For PST LA/LA, she is additionally involved in projects at MOCA, The Hammer, and the Mexican Consulate.
Presented as part of the Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA, organized by REDCAT and supported by a major grant from the Getty Foundation. Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA is part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, taking place from September 2017 through January 2018 at more than 70 cultural institutions across Southern California. Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA is an initiative of the Getty. The presenting sponsor is Bank of America. 
