Genevieve de Leon: To Order the Days / Para Ordenar Los Días
Silpe Gallery
February 23 – March 25, 2023
The Georgette and Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts is an annual artist-in-residency program that brings prominent artists to teach at the Hartford Art School. During her tenure as the 2022-23 Koopman Chair in the Painting Department, Genevieve de Leon has produced solo and collaborative artwork focused on the knowledge–intellectual and embodied–that she has received as part of her study of the Maya calendrical cycles. Maya cosmology, mathematics, and mythology are at the center of an ancient Indigenous knowledge system that is vast and geared to help us locate our place in the cosmos. De Leon’s practice is the outgrowth of her study of this ever-evolving knowledge and her desire to place it in conversation with other systems of knowledge.
The exhibition To Order the Days / Para Ordenar Los Días features de Leon’s newly completed, large-scale paintings of constellations in the Maya Zodiac, alongside her multimedia collaborations with students at the Hartford Art School, Indigenous artists in the Native Youth Arts Collective, and the University of Connecticut’s Milky Way Laboratory.
The exhibition and associated programming are made possible by the Georgette and Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts fund held by Hartford Art School Endowment, Inc.