Visual Voices with Adriana Monsalve

Visual Voices is a Professional Lecture Series offered by Mason Exhibitions and the School of Art at Mason. Speakers are chosen with faculty guidance to represent leading and emerging talented practitioners, as well as artists whose work lies beyond the subject areas of the program offerings.
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Adriana Monsalve (she /they) is an artist, educator, cultural worker and collaborative publisher working (mostly) in the photobook medium. Along with Caterina Ragg, Monsalve is co-founder of Homie House Press, a radical cooperative platform that challenges the ever-changing forms of storytelling with image and text.

Within her photographic practice, Monsalve is an archivist and visual communicator who produces in-depth stories on identity through the nuances in between race, gender, and immigrant adjacent experiences.

Within her cultural work as a collaborative publisher, she holds space for and with underrepresented communities through the multidisciplinary platform of Homie House Press (HHP); a cooperative playground where fotos become books, a safe space for secret stories and an open house for honest content that meets at the intersection of personal, political, and poetic. She is rigorously pushing towards finding ways for photographers and publishers to cultivate the capacity for care and tenderness within structures that actively work against their manifestations. She defines intimacy as the experience of being genuinely seen, heard, and held by another person or group of people.

As an educator, she enacts radical imagination in the classroom daily. Monsalve believes it is the first step in building worlds we can safely live in. She says, “..art maps our journey toward liberation. To realize our freedom fantasies for our larger community, we also engage with education between the practices of imagination and creation. I am certain liberation comes in communal form, because the culture of white-supremacy that we were all born into, thrives on individualism.. In contrast, imagination taps into our desires, so that we can share (education) and realize them collectively (creation).”

https://www.adrianastories.com/

This event will be held at the Center for the Arts Concert Hall on the GMU Fairfax campus and online via Zoom. RSVP is required to receive the Zoom link via email the day-of!