Free
About the lecture
By presenting diverse points of view, the Lunch and Chats with a Designer aim to illustrate the plurality of perspectives and voices inherent to the field of design, and to stimulate a deeper reflection on this topic.
About the guest speaker
Tanya Aguiñiga was born in 1978 in San Diego, California, and raised in Tijuana, Mexico. An artist and craftsperson, Aguiñiga works with traditional craft materials like natural fibres and collaborates with other artists and activists to create sculptures, installations, performances, and community-based art projects. Drawing on her upbringing as a binational citizen, who crossed the border from Tijuana to San Diego daily for school, Aguiñiga’s work speaks of the artist’s experience of her divided identity and aspires to tell the larger and often invisible stories of the transnational community. She is the founder of AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of projects that provides a platform for binational artists. She was recently awarded the Latinx Art Forum: Latinx Artist Fellowship (2022), Heinz Award (2021) and Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities (2018). Her work can be found in the collections of the Hammer Museum, the LACMA, the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt Museum and Renwick Gallery, and the Museum of Art and Design, among others.
About the host
Chief Curator of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts since 2020, Mary-Dailey Desmarais oversees a multidisciplinary team dedicated to enriching, promulgating and preserving a collection of over 45,000 art works and objects dating from antiquity to the present. She joined the Museum in 2014. Notable among the exhibitions she has curated are Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music (2022), How Long Does It Take for One Voice to Reach Another (2021); Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together (2021) and Once Upon a Time... The Western: A New Frontier in Art and Film (2017), whose accompanying catalogue won two awards. She has published widely in scholarly journals, exhibition catalogues, and art magazines on subjects ranging from Impressionism to Global Modern and Contemporary Art. Originally from New York, she holds a Ph.D. in Art History from Yale, an M.A. from Williams College and a B.A. from Stanford.
