As part of our 90th anniversary celebrations, Casita Maria presents the solo exhibition Animal Studies by Chilean Multidisciplinary Artist and Casita Maria Teaching Artist Maria P. Vila, on view in the Casita Maria Gallery September 16, 2024 – March 6, 2025. The exhibition features a series of watercolor, soft pastel and oil paintings combining animal imagery with poetry and collage as a form of healing.
Free opening and closing celebrations will take place on Thursday, September 26, 2024, from 5:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. and Thursday, March 6, both from 5:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. in the Casita Maria Gallery at 928 Simpson Street, 6th floor, Bronx, NY 10459.
During these events, attendees from across New York City and beyond are welcome to meet the artist, view the work, and enjoy refreshments. Music provided by Bronx DJ collective Uptown Vinyl Supreme.
Animal Studies is dedicated to Maria Luisa’s beloved dog Rufían, a lost animal she intended to bring home for just one night and which turned into a 15 year friendship. Following his death in 2022, she started creating the artworks in this exhibition as part of her mourning process. By drawing and painting animals over the course of three years she began to heal and discovered interspecies memory. Her artwork became a metaphor and visual exploration of what it means to be human in all of its many forms: the herd, resilience, migration, and motherhood. There is a clear historical connection to ancient cave paintings such as those found in Lascaux, France, but her greatest artistic influence is her great grandfather, the renowned Chilean painter Waldo Vila Silva.
The work has a quiet beauty and meditative presence whether viewing intimate watercolors of migrating giraffes and a flock of sheep finding safety in numbers or the large scale soft pastel that shows a great herd. The latter serves as a timeline of her process as she refined her craft and the drawings became more detailed. The imagery leads the viewer into moments of self reflection inviting us to explore our reliance on extended networks for survival and comfort.
This exhibition is for the children of Casita Maria and includes artistic contributions from the young artist’s Maria Luisa taught during Casita Maria’s Summer Day Camp. From September through March, the exhibition will be used as a teaching tool during Casita Maria’s K-8 after-school program to teach participants about process, labor, learning from mistakes, healing through art and love.
All are welcome and individual visits and guided tours can be scheduled by e-mailing marketing@casitamaria.org. The artwork is for sale with 75% of proceeds going to the artist and 25% to animal foundation La Manadakan.
Funding for Animal Studies is provided by the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs through the Cultural Development Fund.
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About Maria P. Vila
Maria P. Vila is a Chilean multidisciplinary artist with over a decade of practical research on relational art around the world. Her experience has enabled her to experiment with distinctive communication channels, allowing her to create collective narratives that serve as the main primary material for her pieces.
Her work seeks to create a space in which the community can explore and reflect collectively on social, political, cultural, and ecological issues. Later on, these shared experiences take the form of artist books, installations, or sculptures that seek to serve as a testimony of our collective memory.
Maria Luisa’s artist books can be found in collections such as MoMA, Yale, Stanford and The New School Library among others. Currently, she is developing a NYSCA project, preparing a Stage Directing residency at Mercury Store in Brooklyn and working as a Casita Maria Teaching Artist.
To learn more, please visit here, or follow @mariap.vila.
Artist Statement
I grew up surrounded by the pictorial fantasy of my great-grandfather, the painter Waldo Vila Silva, and the poetic dream of my grandfather, his son, the writer Waldo Vila Suarez. That sparked my artistic spirit and is the raw material for what you see here.
Though I have been painting since I was a child, this is my first painting exhibition. Due to my scenic background and the social commitment inherited from my father, I never conceived art as a two dimensional image, but as a collective event. It is for this reason that when my dog Rufián died and I began to paint animals, the desire was never to exhibit them, but to feel accompanied.
Over time, the process revealed to me that observing animals and translating them into a pictorial form was in itself a collective encounter, a way to honor and recognize our interspecies memory.
This exhibition is the result of a long process of exchange between the spirits of those animals and mine.
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About Casita Maria Center For Arts & Education
Casita Maria Center For Arts & Education is the first and oldest Latino 501(c)(3) charity in NYC, founded in 1934.
The South Bronx-based community arts and educational organization presents diverse, contemporary visual and performing arts and education programming for all ages.
Casita Maria creates a safe and welcoming community, enriching and uplifting youth and families towards success, through shared cultural, art and educational experiences and programs.
Location:
Casita Maria Center For Arts & Education
928 Simpson Street
Bronx, NY 10459
Tel.: 718-589-2230
E–mail: info@casitamaria.org
