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For Rent : Consuelo Castañeda transforms the gallery through an expansive installation based on the artist’s experience as a Cuban émigré and Americas Society’s history in relation to the Cold War.

Anchored by an interactive lounge, Castañeda creates three spaces: a multi-screened projection room that is occupied by Guantanamera (a two-channel video by Ross Birrell and David Harding); a re-creation of Gego’s Reticulárea—an iconic work created for the Americas Society Gallery in 1969; and a retrospective display highlighting the artist’s use of appropriation of historical elements and concepts.

Throughout the run of the exhibition, Castañeda’s lounge is open to a series of interventions, which include a discussion between the artist, the exhibition curator, Carmen Peláez, and Ross Birrell; as well as a literary reading by José Manuel Prieto.

For Rent: Consuelo Castañeda is the first of three exhibitions devoted to mid-career artists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada to be presented annually from 2011 to 2013 by Americas Society’s Visual Arts program in the gallery.

The concept of For Rent proposes an innovative approach to our exhibition space—located in a landmark building at 680 Park Avenue—that consists of temporarily transferring the use and symbolic value of the gallery to the artists. As a point of departure for the project, Americas Society’s curatorial team proposes a topic to each artist. He or she then develops an in situ installation or environment that will become part of the organization’s institutional history. An expert on site-specific art will serve as an interlocutor to ensure the transparency of the process.

Consuelo Castañeda’s response to this call takes place at the intersection of her personal history as a Cuban artist and émigré, and Americas Society’s exhibition history. The subject proposed to Consuelo Castañeda was the Cold War. Using multiple strategies, Castañeda postulates the existence of an intellectual, social landscape meaningful to diverse groups of people. She asserts the possibility of an art venue as a trans-cultural, social space, and invites the public to lounge and contemplate the galleries and their history.  She excavates art history to unearth visual formats and systems that serve her goal of ordering information in such a way that generates knowledge about propaganda generated in both the “east” and “west.”

This exhibition includes a retrospective. The artist’s career is described through the reproduction of her work in wallpaper, arranged in light of her cross-disciplinary practice that began and flourished in the academic setting of post-revolutionary Cuba and evolved in Diaspora during her time in Mexico and now Miami. A radical curatorial intervention informs this project: it occurs as an invitation to Scottish filmmakers David Harding and Ross Birrell to present their twin screen installation Guantanamera at the exhibition’s center. Through arrangements of signs, branded symbols, and iconic cultural forms, Castañeda and her colleagues reframe the modes by which these images circulate and assume meaning in free-market and communist systems.

The interlocutor working on this project alongside Castañeda is Yasmeen Siddiqui in collaboration with Gabriela Rangel.

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Americas Society is part of ¡Sí Cuba! Festival, a New York celebration of Cuban arts and culture. See more Sí Cuba! Festival events.

• Directions: Subway: 6 to 68th Street - Hunter College