Join us for a talk with Vault Project artist Josué Morales Urbina as he talks about his installation Pericón: A Cure for All Ailments.

Josué Morales Urbina in Conversation

Join us for an engaging conversation with artist Josué Morales Urbina as he reflects on his artistic career and discusses Pericón: A Cure for All Ailments, his site-specific installation created within ArtsWestchester’s historic bank vault. The interview will be led by artist Julie Langsam, offering unique insight into Morales Urbina’s artistic practice, influences, and the development of this remarkable work.

About the artist:

Based in the New York Metropolitan area, Josué Morales Urbina is an award-winning installation and sculpture artist, whose work primarily explores transcultural displacement and dépaysement. Among frequent themes that arise in his art are a pervading sense of foreignness and the impermanence of memory, which he examines via contemplative abstract installations. These works are composed of a broad range of materials, including ordinary household objects such as, drinking straws, coffee beans, toasted white bread, rubber bands, and edible materials.

The questions of foreignness in Morales Urbina’s work are rooted in his being born in Guatemala City, Guatemala, and having lived across the United States as a “third culture kid” (an individual raised in a culture other than their parents’). Yet, as much as he creates to engage audiences in such explorations, Urbina’s artmaking has also afforded him the self-discovery that he, ultimately, creates art “to build a home for myself; my art practice is my home.”

Morales Urbina’s career is marked by numerous accomplishments; he has exhibited widely nationally and internationally. An alum of the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, he has completed residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, La Napoule Art Foundation’s Résidence d’Artiste Internationale, Centrum in Washington state, GoggleWorks, Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, NARS International AIR, SVA Artist Residency Program, ChaNorth, Banff, and the Textile Arts Center’s AIR 16.

About Julie Langsam

For nearly 4 decades Julie Langsam has examined the formal and conceptual tenets of modernism in work that spans painting, drawing, filmmaking, photography, and printmaking. Langsam often combines images that reference both the romantic sublime of the 19th century and the 20th century’s failed utopian ideals as a way to examine ideas about beauty, nature, and progress, within the context of the 21st century. Langsam recently finished a short experimental documentary film about the landscape of New Jersey called “Garden State” and is editing her feature-length film about the US as seen through the lens of the landscape.

Langsam has exhibited nationally and internationally. Solo exhibitions include Gallery Thomas Jaeckel; Frederieke Taylor Gallery; and Michael Steinberg Fine Art in NYC; Maass Gallery at SUNY Purchase; Espai 8 in Barcelona; Reykjavik Art Gallery, Iceland; and Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, among others. She is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award and is represented in collections throughout the United States and Europe. Among Langsam’s other activities she is curator of such exhibitions as “Color as Structure” at Frederieke Taylor Gallery in NYC and “The Big Bang” at SPACES Gallery in Cleveland, OH. Langsam is currently Associate Professor at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers and was former Motto Endowed Chair and Head of Painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

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