Roberto Tejada • Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness
Reception + Performance
Reception: 7:00 PM, refreshments and appetizers
Performance: 7:45-8:15 PM, with special guests Gilbert Baca, Matt Flores, and Laura Quinton
Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness is a collection of essays and manifestos engaging hemispheric desires and borderland eventualities in the geopolitical imagination of the Americas. The book enlivens a capacious Latinx poetics, spanning to include 16th- and 17th-century imperial accounts, modern and contemporary depictions of Mexico and Cuba pictured by U.S. artists and writers: a poetics of the Americas reflecting the fear and fantasies prompted by metaphors of occupation, displacement, and counter-conquest.
Special guests Gilbert Baca, Matt Flores, and Laura Quintón are Houston-based writers and University of Houston Mellon Scholars.
Map, Routes of Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, and De Soto and Moscosco. University of Texas Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, from Atlas of Texas, published by The University of Texas at Austin, Bureau of Business Research, 1976.
Roberto Tejada is the author of art histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (U Minnesota, 2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (UCLA/CSRC; U Minnesota, 2009). His writings appear frequently in journals and exhibition catalogs, among them Images of the Spirit: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide (Aperture, 1996); Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 (UCLA Hammer Museum, 2011) and Groups and Spaces in Mexico, Contemporary Art of the 90s: Licenciado Verdad (Mexico City, Ediciones MP, 2017). He is the author of poetry collections that include Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan 2010), Mirrors for Gold (2006), and selected poems in Spanish translation Todo en el ahora (2015), He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing and Art History at the University of Houston.
