Wednesday, April 29, 6PM
Logan Center for the Arts, Room 801
You are invited to join us at the Logan Center for the Arts for a talk and conversation with visual artist and poet Edgar Calel, who will be visiting Chicago for the inauguration of the exhibition Edgar Calel: Corn Mountain of Life (Ixim Juyu K’aslem) opening at the Art Institute of Chicago on May 2, 2026. Calel will be joined by Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, Edgar Garcia, for a discussion around Calel's artistic practice and concerns.
Please note: this talk and conversation between the participants will take place in Spanish. A live consecutive interpretation to English will be available throughout the talk and conversation.
Presented by the Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts alongside the Art Institute of Chicago on the occasion of Edgar Calel: Corn Mountain of Life (Ixim Juyu K’aslem) from May 2–Sep 13, 2026 curated by Giampaolo Bianconi, Dittmer Associate Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art.
Edgar Calel (b. 1987, Chi Xot [San Juan Comalapa], Guatemala) Lives and works in Chi Xot. As a visual artist and poet, Calel engages with topics related to the rich cultural heritage and rituals of Guatemala’s midwestern highlands, where he resides. Hailing from a family of Maya-Kaqchikel artists and artisans, Calel works across drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, often engaging with sites and traditions around his hometown of Chi Xot (San Juan Comalapa) as creative touchstones for works that meticulously interconnect localities, at home and internationally. The artist’s primary concerns include exploring the complexities of Indigenous experiences and representing the Maya-Kaqchikel worldview to new publics. Calel, a leading voice of institutional critique among Latin American artists, frequently addresses power dynamics and historical shifts while raising the profile of Indigenous peoples through an anticolonial transmission of living beliefs and customs.
Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Art Institute Chicago, Chicago (2026); Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (2026); Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho (2025); Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (2024); Mendes Wood DM, Germantown (2024); Desanexo do Desapê, São Paulo (2023); Sculpture Center, New York (2023); Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City (2022).
Edgar Garcia is a poet and scholar of the hemispheric cultures of the Americas. He is the author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019); Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020); Infinite Regress (collaborative work with Eamon Ore-Giron, Bom Dia Books, 2021); and Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). His collection of adaptations and translations of mid-sixteenth century Nahuatl-language songs, Cantares, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in 2026; and a book about the baroque titled Caravaggio’s Americas is also in final stages of completion. Most recently he has been collaborating with the American Modern Opera Company on adaptations of these writings, which have performed at the Clark Art Institute, Peabody Essex Museum, and Lincoln Center. He is faculty in the departments of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.