When Forces Shape Form

In this virtual presentation, curator and artist Carina Evangelista considers how artists respond to political forces in their work. Evangelista’s curated slides and corresponding talk will highlight “the kind of art in which we can read artists’ instincts toward responding to the world. Giving voice to pain and heartbreak—to bear witness and to engender empathy.”

“These works are political in nature but are just samplers—swatches in the larger tapestry of expressions of dissent and resistance from different parts of the world and of different persuasions. It is not necessarily meant to offer any direct allegiances toward one cause or the other but really to show the incredible variety of ways that artists speak to the realities they choose to confront. To quote Baldwin again, ‘Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’”

This is a virtual program; please note: registration is required.

About the Artists

Carina Evangelista is a curator and an artist. Currently an independent curator, her past credentials include having worked in curatorial or editorial capacity at institutions both in the U.S. and the Philippines. She has served as Senior Director of Curatorial Affairs at Oklahoma Contemporary; as Deputy Director and subsequently Interim Director at Asia Society Museum and its Global Artistic Programs; as Editor at Artifex Press (now Cahiers d’Art Institute); as Curator at Delaware Contemporary; as Guest Curator and Guest Lecturer at Art Fair Philippines and universities in different cities in the Philippines.

She was a cohort member of the 2024 Creative Leaders Guild Institute. She served as mentor to Hamiltonian Artists fellows Misha Ilyin and Kat Thompson. Projects she has worked on have featured artists such as Poklong Anading, Constancio Bernardo, Chakaia Booker, Crystal Z Campbell, Roberto Chabet, Chuck Close, Maren Hassinger, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, Akira Kurosawa, Sol LeWitt, Robert Montgomery, Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, Jet Pascua, Howardena Pindell, Ed Ruscha, Eva Schlegel, Yasmin Sison, Tony Smith, Robert Storr, and Weegee. 

An Asian Cultural Council fellowship led to her sustained involvement in the arts in the Philippines. In 2015, a rock opera for which she wrote the libretto was staged by Ballet Philippines. In 2017, she organized Counterfeit Monochromes at MO_Space, tackling the political and psychological underpinnings of Philippine conceptualism. She began exhibiting as a visual artist in 2017 and was featured in the 2018 Manila Biennale, Open City. Her first solo show, titled Las Flores del Mal, was based loosely on Charles Baudelaire’s collection of poems, Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil). Discrete objects and groupings of objects in the show comment on the treachery of beauty used as a rhetorical device that masks what menace, melancholy, or tragedy ferments underneath. As an artist, she is particularly interested in threading historical or art historical references with text, creating or abstracting codes, and transmuting symbols.