Episode 74 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast just dropped! I talk with artist, designer, and art director Veronica Corzo-Duchardt about the personal and collective histories hidden in Cuban architectural surfaces, how current scholarship in diaspora studies and cultural anthropology inspires Veronica’s art work, how to make time for your own writing and creative projects amidst other responsibilities, and why intersectional creative collaboration is key to how Veronica imagines otherwise.
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You can also read the transcript and show notes on the Ideas on Fire website, which have links to Veronica’s work and all the concepts, people, and events we discuss on the show (great for teaching!).
Guest: Veronica Corzo-Duchardt
Veronica is queer Cuban-American artist, designer, and art director.
Her art work engages with popular representations of Cuba to reflect upon tensions between personal and cultural identity, memory, history, and nostalgia. She uses a variety of media including screenprints, photography, objects, text, mixed-media, and digital platforms to explore the multivalent ways we share and preserve our individual and collective histories.
In addition to her fine art work, Veronica is an art director at Bitch Media and works with clients under her studio name, Winterbureau.
She has collaborated with clients across cultural institutions, publishing, arts organizations and fashion to create culturally-rooted, contemporary, expressive work. Some of her clients include included the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Chicago Design Museum, Adidas, and CB2.
She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. Veronica’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), the Centro Pablo Cultural Center (Havana, Cuba), and the Public Works Gallery (Chicago). Her prints and artist books are held in permanent collections at the Newberry Library (Chicago), the Joan Flasch Artist’s Book Collection (Chicago), and the Museum of Design (Zürich, Switzerland).
Veronica is also included in New York Times best-selling book In the Company of Women by Grace Bonney (Artisan Books, 2016).
Key quote
“I want a world that’s equitable. I want a world that values art. Something that I try to get across in my artwork too is a world that approaches differences in people from a place of genuine curiosity versus exoticism or fear. And to quote Angela Davis, really thinking about not so much the intersectionalities of identities but the intersectionalities of struggles and how we relate to each other on that level.”
– Veronica Corzo-Duchardt on episode 74 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast
