Nayda Collazo-Llorens
| Nayda Collazo-Llorens | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1968 (age 48–49) San Juan, Puerto Rico |
| Nationality | American |
| Movement | Installation Art, Intervention/Social Practice Art, Video Art |
| Website | http://www.naydacollazollorens.com |
Nayda Collazo-Llorens (born 1968 in San Juan, PR) is a visual artist whose work spans drawing, painting, printmaking, installation, video, and public art. Her work combines images, sound, and text to investigate how the mind processes information. While themes of displacement, alienation, and synchronicity permeate her videos and interventions, her most recent text-based works explore post-alphabetic communication, hyperconnectivity and “noise” as systems of information. Collazo-Llorens is the granddaughter of the Puerto Rican literary critic, linguist, and lexicographer, Washington Llorens. Though born and raised in Puerto Rico, she attended college and graduate school in the United States, receiving her BFA in printmaking and graphic design from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1990 and her MFA from New York University in 2002. She has taught at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University School of Art, Kalamazoo College, and, from fall 2014 to spring 2017, held the position of Stuart and Barbara Padnos Distinguished Artist in Residence at Grand Valley State University.
Collazo-Llorens is a member of a generation of artists who critic Manuel Alvarez Lezama has dubbed “Los Novísimos” – “The Newest Ones” – which he defines as Puerto Rican artists coming of artistic age in the 1990s responsible for an infusion of provocative contemporary art into the Puerto Rican art scene. The artists of “Los Novísimos” – including Allora & Calzadilla, Fernando Colón Gonzalez, Yvelisse Jiménez, Arnaldo Morales, and Miguel Trelles – often use mapping terminology, such as the metaphor of the “axis,” discussed by key Latin American cultural critics such as Monica Amor, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Gerardo Mosquera, among others. Curator Silvia Karman Cubiña sees the work of this generation of artists as neo-conceptual, “in which object and content are mutually dependent.” For her, “these artists navigate issues of identity, displacement and politics, but contrary to [Puerto Rican] artists of previous generations, they do so without nostalgia or resistance.” Holland Cotter, speaking of Collazo-Llorens's participation in the exhibition None of the Above: Contemporary Work by Puerto Rican Artists at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut, writes: "the diaspora phenomenon has become the basis for a new kind of identity politics. The art it produces is internationalist in style, embracing photography, video and installation, and tends to hold what might be called indigenous culture at a wry arm's length, in some cases bypassing it.
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