Exhibition Walkthrough: Fanny Sanín: Geometric Equations

Join us at Americas Society for an exhibition walkthrough of Fanny Sanín: Geometric Equations led by the exhibition curator Edward J. Sullivan, in conversation with art historian and curator Megan Kincaid and the artist Fanny Sanín.  The walkthrough will explore Fanny Sanín’s five-decade career, showcasing her evolution across monumental acrylic paintings, smaller compositions, and pencil studies—underscoring her pivotal role in shaping abstract art both in Latin America and the United States. As they move through the exhibition, the speakers will explore the progression of Fanny Sanín’s artistic vision, examining the continuity and transformation of abstract forms across her career, from early influences to her mature work. A reception will close the event.

Thursday, July 10, 6:00-7:30 pm ET
680 Park Ave, New York, NY
Registration is required.
Register Here
This event is in person, free, and open to the public. Please note that this is a standing event. Early arrival is suggested as space is limited, and entry is not guaranteed for late arrivals.

Speakers 

Fanny Sanín's more than six-decade professional career—from her native Bogotá to Urbana, Illinois; Monterrey, México; London; and New York—demonstrates the continuous development from the initial expressionistic art to her geometric works. Major museums collect her work, such as, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Museos de Arte Moderno of México, of Bogotá and of Medellín, Museo Nacional and Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia in Bogotá, University of California at Berkeley, Oberlin College, and Wellesley College. The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU featured her work. Recently, paintings entered the collections of the Tate Modern and the Museo Reina Sofía. Key recent exhibitions include the inaugural exhibition of the David Rockefeller Creative Arts Center, the Achi Art Triennial, and the landmark exhibition in England, France, and Germany, Action-Gesture-Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–70. She was invited to the main section of the 2024 Venice Art Biennale. The 2019 monograph Fanny Sanín: The Concrete Language of Color and Structure presents a comprehensive review of her oeuvre. Galleries that represent her include Sicardi Ayers Bacino, Houston; Durban Segnini, Miami; Goya Contemporary, Baltimore; and Alonso Garcés, Bogotá. Her Legacy Project, led by prominent scholars, is committed to the placement of works in major museums and collections and later will continue as a trust responsible for the legacy of Fanny Sanín’s art.

Dr. Megan Kincaid is an art historian and curator based in New York, where she serves on the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences at The Cooper Union. She has previously taught on modern art and dance history at New York University. Her research and teaching advance new models for rethinking modernism's disciplinary perimeters and historiography, particularly by reconstructing transnational episodes and the dynamics of cultural contact between Europe and the Americas. A related interest centers alternate narratives of abstraction's development and ideological applications. Studying mobility, migration, and network formation, her work at present suggests a revolutionary theory of abstraction, devised by artists displaced during World War II, ruptured the perforce conventions of abstraction and the landscape genre alike––giving visual expression to shifting notions of place, land, and identity shaped by the period's land-based dispossession, statelessness, and cultural nationalism.

Kincaid holds a PhD from The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU (2024) and BA in Art History from Columbia University (2017). Her scholarship has been supported by the Museum of Modern Art, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, the Henry Moore Foundation, and the NYU Center for the Humanities and published by journals including Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and Vistas: Critical Approaches to Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art, as well as monographs and volumes for university presses, museums, and galleries. Kincaid regularly contributes art criticism to Artforum and The Brooklyn Rail. Her curatorial practice includes exhibitions of Chicane muralism in Los Angeles, José Antonio Fernández-Muro, Fanny Sanín, Cauleen Smith, Carrie Mae Weems, Charles White, and more. Currently, she is at work on a book manuscript entitled Imaginative Landscapes: Unrooting Modernist Abstraction in the 1940s, as well as forthcoming articles and interviews with contemporary artists. 

Dr. Edward J. Sullivan is the Helen Gould Shepard professor in the history of art at the Institute of Fine Arts and College of Arts and Sciences, New York University. A prominent scholar and curator in the field of modern and contemporary Latin American and Caribbean art, Sullivan is the author of numerous books and exhibition catalogs in this area. Among his publications are: Making the Americas Modern: Hemispheric Art 1910–1960; From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of Impressionism, and The Language of Objects in the Art of the Americas. He curated the 2019 exhibition Brazilian Modern: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx at the New York Botanical Garden and the 2018 exhibition Processing: Paintings and Prints by Roberto Juarez at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, Colorado. His forthcoming publication is Latino New York, Art and Experience: 1970-2001 (Yale University Press).