Julia P. Herzberg is an art historian, independent curator, and Fulbright Senior Specialist living in New York. She completed her PhD in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 1998, with a dissertation on Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. She is a specialist of Latin American artists living in the United States, and has curated more than twenty-five exhibitions. Herzberg was a co-curator of The Decade Show (1990), held in New York at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, the New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and she was the curator of the official U.S. representation for the III Bienal Internacional de Pintura in Cuenca, Ecuador (1991). IIn addition to serving as a consulting curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York (1996–2001), she was a consulting curator for the 2003, 2006, and 2009 Bienales de La Habana, and she is a contributing and consulting editor for Arte al día Internacional. Herzberg has taught, lectured, and published extensively in the United States and abroad and received two J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board awards: one at the Pontificia Universidad Católica (2007) and another at the Universidad Diego Portales (2013), both in Santiago, Chile, and also served as a visiting professor at the Instituto de Arte, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile (2016).
Josely Carvalho (b. 1942, São Paulo, Brazil) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives between New York and Rio de Janeiro. She studied art at the FAAP (Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado, in São Paulo) before moving to the United States and earning her BA in architecture from the University of Washington. From 1971 to 1974 she taught architecture at the ENA-UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). In 1976 she moved to New York City, where she founded the Silkscreen Project at St. Mark’s Church, producing materials for political demonstrations (1976–87). Though her early production was in printmaking, over time she developed a mixed-media practice that includes silkscreen, video, performance, installation, poetry, book making, and Internet art. Her work engages sociopolitical issues and addresses themes including memory, identity, the body, and social justice. Her work has been exhibited at the II Bienal de La Habana (1986), Museum of Modern Art, New York (1988), Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela (1989), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017), Brooklyn Museum, New York (2018), and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil (2018). Following her Diary of Images project (1970s–’90s), she began her current cross-disciplinary sensorial project, Diary of Smells.
This essay appears in the exhibition catalogue for two related installations by Carvalho, It’s Still a Time to Mourn: Dia Mater I, held at Art in General, New York (January 16–March 3, 1993) and Tempos de Luto: Dia Mater II, organized by MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo), from February 19 to March 21, 1993. The works described in the essay exemplify the artist’s layered and multimedia engagement with politics and current events and her interest in feminist themes. The author details earlier works in the same series, including the installations Theatre of War (1991) and It’s Still Time to Mourn: A Memorial Tent (1991), as well as Carvalho’s book It’s Still a Time to Mourn (1992).
