Join Public Art Fund and The Cooper Union in celebration of Felipe Baeza’s exhibition Unruly Forms, where fantastical images conjure realms of myth, spirit, and imagination, now on view across bus shelters in the United States and Mexico. A 2009 Cooper Union School of Art alumnus, Baeza will be in dialogue with writer and scholar Gayatri Gopinath to discuss how histories, cultures, landscapes, and bodies shape our ever-evolving identities. The conversation will explore the hybrid process behind Baeza’s new series, informed by his research on Mesoamerican artifacts in museum collections as well as his own experiences of physical and social displacement and difference.

Register here. Please note this free event is first-come-first-served, and an RSVP does not guarantee admission.

Email Gabriela López Dena, associate curator of public practice, at glopez@publicartfund.org with questions and requests for accessibility. Please send any needs for services or accommodations to support your participation in this program, including ASL interpretations, by Monday, September 4.

Felipe Baeza fuses collage, painting, printmaking, and other techniques to create multilayered, textural works that explore notions of the body and migration. His sensually rich and visually arresting works evoke both mythic dimensions and contemporary themes. Baeza’s figures, created over densely layered paintings, appear in different states of becoming and, at times, are even abstracted to the point of invisibility. His work was in The Milk of Dreams, 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2022), and his most recent solo exhibitions include: Made Into Being, Fortnight Institute, New York (2022) and Unruly Suspension, Maureen Paley, London (2021). Baeza’s works are in public collections across the United States, and he is the recipient of a Latinx Artist Fellowship by the U.S. Latinx Art Forum, Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, and completed residencies at NXTHVN and the Getty Research Institute. Baeza received a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from Yale.

Gayatri Gopinath is a professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, and is the author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures and Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora. She has published numerous essays on gender, sexuality, and queer diasporic visual art and culture in anthologies and journals such as Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, GLQ, and Social Text, as well as in art publications such as PIX: A Journal of Contemporary Indian Photography, Tribe: Photography and New Media from the Arab World, and ArtReview Asia. She is the Principal Investigator of the Intersectional Feminist/Queer Studies Collective at NYU and the recipient of the 2023 NYU Dorothy Irene Height Faculty Award.

Public Art Fund Talks, organized in collaboration with The Cooper Union, connect compelling contemporary artists to a broad public by establishing a dialogue about artistic practices and public art. The Talks series features internationally renowned artists who offer insights into artmaking and its personal, social, and cultural contexts. The core values of creative expression and democratic access to culture and learning shared by both Public Art Fund and The Cooper Union are embodied in this ongoing collaboration. In the spirit of accessibility to the broadest and most diverse public, the Talks are offered free of charge.