d*star Panel Series: Carolina Caycedo + Charles Rencountre + Alicia de Silva
Carolina Caycedo (1978, lives in Los Angeles) transcends the studio, gallery, museum and institutional space to work in the social realm where she participates in movements of solidarity economies and territorial resistance. She is currently researching the effects of extractivist economies and policies over rural public space such as rivers, and social and natural territories in various bio-regions of the Americas. Her practice engages with issues and contexts that affect a broad public on an everyday level; in her work, art functions as a tool for offering alternative models to inhabit a world in which individuals and communities are increasingly subject to commodification, exploitation and discrimination.
She has developed publicly engaged projects in Bogota., Madrid, Lisbon, San Juan, New York, San Francisco and London. Her work has been shown by Creative Time, the Queens Museum, Vienna Secession and Palais de Tokio amongst other venues. She has participated in numerous international biennials, including Berlin (2014), Havana (2009), Venice (2003) and Istanbul (2001). In 2012, Caycedo was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin resident. In 2013 she received a Prince Claus Fund grant for Rethinking Public Space, and in 2014 an Art Matters grant. She is a 2015 Creative Capital Visual Arts Awardee.
Charles Rencountre is a member of the Sicangu people, from the Lower Brule reservation in South Dakota. His Lakota ancestors and heritage influence his first sculptural renderings. As a young man, Charles inherited wood and stone from his grandfather who’d been a traditional pipe carver for the community. After a few trials and errors Charles realized he was adept with the stone and he was fearless to try things that he could imagine and in turn make.
As such Charles is a self-taught sculptor who was also inspired by the great European masters Da Vinci and Michelangelo. To make life-size figures he rendered the human form using geometric equation. Using anatomy books he learned to carve stone and wood and clay into life-size pieces.
Charles returned to school and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2015 as the class’s valedictorian. Though he prides himself as being an “artist unknown,” he’s also been awarded several recognitions including a fellowship from the National Museum of the American Indian in 2014.
Alicia Marie Rencountre Da Silva is an academic, artist, poet, and writer. She earned her BFA degrees in Creative Writing and in Studio Arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She also gained her certificate in Museum Studies in 2016. Through an Intermedia Arts 2015 fellowship she learned and practiced ABCD or Art Based Community Development funded by the Bush Foundation. This fellowship helped her to more clearly understand her own commitment to Social Practice work as she continues both as an artist, poet, and as a curator in her community of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Ms. Da Silva was born in New York City. Her lineages are from Colombia and Guyana, S.A. She is Muisca, Mestizo, and Portuguese. Her husband, Charles Rencountre, (Lower Brule Sioux Nation), has worked with her on projects in museums and also they work together as fellow collaborating artists. They design projects that involve and respond to community. Currently Ms. Da Silva is the Project manager for the “Not Afraid to Look” monument being built at the Sacred Stone Camp. The Sacred Stone Camp is the place where 7,000 people are gathered to pray and protect the waters there from the Dakota Access Pipeline project. Charles Rencountre worked at the camp sculpting the piece “Not Afraid to Look” with community support, through mid October of 2016.
Alicia Da Silva is about to apply for her PhD in American Studies and will do her work looking at how the more recent application and repatriation practices of the 20th century, changes how communities and societies understand themselves, both in indigenous and non-indigenous communities.