"Meet the Artist" with Juan Orrantia

On Thursday, February 13, we welcome Juan Orrantia to “Meet the Artist” night at CPW. Speaking through two of his photobooks, Like Stains of Red Dirt (Dalpine 2020) and Juan sin Miedo (Artist edition, Dreampress 2023), Juan will be approaching ideas about color, appropriation and the photobook as strategies through which to interrogate and unsettle. Juan’s practice is built from movements between Colombia, South Africa and the US that have shaped his ideas of dislocation and unsettling as forms of rethinking representations, narratives and experiences of looking and being seen. These works move through autobiographical threads entangled with experiences of dislocation, representation, fatherhood/family, race, patriarchy and masculinity. Juan will have a few copies of Like Stains of Red Dirt available for purchase throughout the evening.

Join us every Thursday evening at CPW, when we host illuminating talks with local and visiting artists. “Meet the Artist” allows the public to get to know new work, to hear about artistic processes, and to meet friends and other local artists. The evening takes place at CPW’s gallery at 474 Broadway in Kingston, NY. It is free and open to the public. Coffee, tea, and snacks are served. “Meet the Artist” is made possible by a generous grant from the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation.

Juan Orrantia is a Colombian photographer who spent much of his adult life in South Africa. His practice follows autobiographical threads through conditions of dislocation, postcoloniality, and representation. Through strategies like color alteration and image intervention he makes observational and constructed images that challenge the viewer to acts of reconsideration and re-seeing Juan’s first book “Like Stains of Red Dirt” (Dalpine 2020) was winner of the Fiebre Dummy Award. He has also published “A Machete Pelao” (Cdf 2022), winner of the Fotolibro Latinoamericano Centro de Fotografia de Montevideo, and “O”, a companion to A Machete–as part of AñZ-Fotografia Expandida en Latinoamérica (Raya editorial, 2024). His books make part of collections like MoMA, the Smithsonian Museum of African Art Library, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, and the Wits Museum of Art. Juan has exhibited at the Bamako Biennale, Art Photo Barcelona, Centro de la Imagen Mexico City, and reviews of his work appear in Aperture, Nearest Truth, BJP, Africa is a Country among others. Currently he lives in the US where he is Assistant Professor of Fine Art Photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He holds an MFA in Photography from Hartford Art School and a PhD from Yale University.

Images © Juan Orrantia.

Host or Publisher The Center for Photography at Woodstock