What documents constrain, narrate, or liberate subjecthood?
Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist whose work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. Through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance, Gaspar's practice situates itself within historically marginalized sites and spans multiple formats, scales, and durations to produce liberatory actions. Gaspar's projects have been supported by the Art for Justice Fund, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Maria has received the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. Gaspar has exhibited extensively at venues including the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; MoMAPS1, New York; and has led a decade’s long social practice project inside and outside Cook County Jail, Chicago. She is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, holds an MFA from UIC Chicago, and a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Disappearance Landscape
Disappearance Landscape was a virtual workshop that used the body to interrogate and intervene highly contested sites. Using green screen strategies, participants examined jails, prisons, border walls, conflict zones, and other places of power in order to mediate, flip, dissect, transpose, or dismantle forms of oppression and confinement.
