Thomas Glassford

Mexico City based artist Thomas Glassford's objects and large-scale projects are distinguished for their engagement with the layered materiality of the modern urban milieu. Often located in politically charged spaces — the US-Mexico Border, the Tlatelolco Housing Project in Mexico City - Glassford's public projects forge a relationship between the artist's interest in the history of our materiality and definite physical places. In so doing, Glassford transforms sites coded with violence, suturing their wounds or giving them new "skin". These exquisite corpses establish the conditions for a new functionality without eviscerating memory or fetishizing trauma.

Glassford will discuss the process of working with the politics of place with the Art Historian Mary Coffey (Assistant Professor, Dartmouth University). How does the artist bring his personal aesthetic into a meaningful relationship with social space, popular memory, and the built environment? The dialogue will emphasize the creative process as well as the political, economic, and logistical challenges involved in executing public commissions within a transnational art market.

This program is organized in collaboration with the Mexican Cultural Institute and Sicardi Gallery.






my friend, Blair is doing the print design for this show. she shared this with me today and i felt instantly drawn. it is distantly relevant to the project we are giving birth to right now.