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). In 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).
Magdalena Fernández (b. 1964, Caracas) is a Caracas-based multimedia artist working in drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, urban interventions, and video informed by the history of Modernist geometric abstraction in the Americas and Europe. Having studied math and physics in Caracas at the Universidad Católica Andres Bello before training as a graphic designer at the Bauhaus-influenced Instituto de Diseño Fundación Neumann in the 1980s, she went on to work in Italy in the studio of the Minimalist Italian architect-designer A. G. Fronzoni (1923–2002) in the 1990s. Her nonobjective works are linked to nature, particularly to Caracas’ tropical surroundings, as well as to Modernist architecture and design. She often specifically references historic geometric abstractionist artists from the Americas and Europe, including Piet Mondrian (the Netherlands, 1872–1944), Joaquín Torres-García (Uruguay, 1874–1949), Kazimir Malevich (Russia, 1879–1935), Sol Lewitt (United States, 1928–2007), and Hélio Oiticica (Brazil, 1937–1980). Her work has been exhibited at the Biennale di Venezia; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Other spatial environments by the artist utilize various materials such as elastic bands anchored to walls creating a system of interlaced lines through which visitors move, and a light sculpture composed of PVC tubes, lightbulbs, and optical lighting film. Fernández also creates abstract animations that she calls “mobile” drawings and paintings, two of which juxtapose her animations with the sounds of tropical animals.
Magdalena Fernández: 2iPM009 was curated by Julia Herzberg at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University (Miami), and was on view from October 12, 2011, to January 8, 2012. It later traveled to the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, where it was on view from February 25 to May 27, 2012. Herzberg wanted to bring the video installation to the Frost Museum of Art after having first viewed it at the 10th Bienal de Cuenca in Ecuador (2009). Fernández’s work is generally interpreted as a continuation of the legacy of the iconic Venezuelan midcentury geometric abstractionists Gego (1912–1994), Alejandro Otero (1921–1990), and Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005), who combined abstraction with light and kinesthetic properties.
