Juxtapoz Journal – Aliza Nisenbaum: Altanera, Preciosa y Orgullosa


Within the Juxtapoz Fall 2024 Quarterly, Charles Moore wrote in his survey on modern Mexican artwork, “Primarily based in New York, the Columbia College professor Aliza Nisenbaum paints colourful portraits that humanize underserved international communities, providing an intimate take a look at numerous cultures and relationships. By an typically political lens, Nisenbaum gravitates towards the favored aesthetics of Mexico, such because the intricate textures, patterns, and brilliant colours of her upbringing. No id is homogeneous, she notes, and this viewpoint is clear within the artist’s work. Nisenbaum’s works showcase the plurality of humanity, our traditions, and micro-differences, with an emphasis on solidarity, sensitivity, and entry.”

Regen Initiatives is happy to current Altanera, Preciosa y Orgullosa, New York-based artist Aliza Nisenbaum’s first exhibition with the gallery and in Los Angeles. The exhibition will function a brand new physique of labor depicting dance troupes, studios, and academics native to Southern California, together with Teresita de Jesús of Studio 10, Folklorico Revolución, Mariachi Tierra Mia, and Amelia Muñoz Dancers. Knowledgeable by her origins in Mexico and prior work with immigrant and diasporic communities, Nisenbaum’s energetic compositions exemplify the artist’s dedication to fostering connection and neighborhood within the area of portray. 

An early, main determine within the centrality of illustration and portraiture within the previous decade, Nisenbaum develops vibrant, figurative work by way of a type of participatory remark. She forges relationships together with her topics and connects meaningfully to the advanced communities they create collectively. Knowledgeable by a various array of creative and political traditions, Nisenbaum’s photos (and the method by way of which they’re made) recall forebears akin to Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh, and Diego Rivera.

From mariachi to salsa, the works give painterly form to the fleeting festivity of those traditions. Exploring connections between sight and sound, they evoke music and motion in an in any other case static, silent medium by the use of shade, contour, and sample. As such, they recall modernist experiments and visionaries akin to Sonia Delaunay and Florine Stettheimer. Aware of the ever-intensifying specter of expertise that shapes our day by day lives and recalling sociologist Émile Durkheim’s concept of “collective effervescence,” Nisenbaum’s work have a good time these areas and events for dancing as consecrated moments other than our screens and units, reminding us of the pleasure of being extra absolutely of and with our our bodies and one another.

The exhibition’s title, Altanera, Preciosa y Orgullosa, attracts from “La Bikina,” an iconic Mexican ballad, and describes the tune’s namesake topic, a “haughty, attractive and proud” lady. As such, it alludes to the sounds and sentiments that may accompany the dancers and musicians pictured all through Nisenbaum’s work, in addition to her overarching curiosity in depictions of feminine energy, independence, and self-assuredness. These themes recur in La Bruja, a portray of dancers studying to hold lit candles safely atop their heads as they dance to lyrics that describe a witch, or “bruja,” at work in the midst of the night time. For Nisenbaum, La Bruja, like “La Bikina,” evokes a strong mythology of robust ladies, knowledgeable by their very own company and management as they transfer by way of the world.

Poised and centered, Shine Arm Styling, on 1, introduces us to a duo particularly attentive to essentially the most decisive particulars. Likewise, Nisenbaum’s work orchestrate a rigorously calibrated live performance of buzzing patterns and colours, from the rhyming latticework of tights to the gauzy curtains that drape and cocoon the rooms, the lacey fretwork of leotards and costumes, and the pronounced grain of the picket flooring. Animating and unbridled patterning recurs throughout the canvases, a painterly translation of the vitality of the dancers and the spirit of their music. Simply as the ladies faucet increasingly more frenetically in La Bruja—constructing and accelerating—the sample that frames them expands by way of and past the figures, likening the sonic expertise to this visible impact, in addition to the tempo of paint dealing with that produces it.

Equally, as dancers slide and screech to a halt, the undulating movement of the picket flooring mirrors the motion of the figures through painterly gesture. Rehearsal mirrors and elevated bars event playful angles, geometries, and juxtapositions, increasing and suturing areas and passages. They punctuate, body, divide, and at occasions provocatively double and even triple figures and kinds, creating and implying photos inside photos. Such reflections liken Nisenbaum’s exercise as a painter to that of the whirling dancers. Her advanced tableaux reveal her deep consciousness and clear delight within the prospects of portray to relate human expertise and the relationships that maintain us.



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