This Sunday June 14th we invite you all to the Orensanz Summer Museum opening at Governors Island building #11 from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm. We encourage all of you to take the 10 minute ferry departing from South Manhattan and make a pleasant promenade to the Island, where we will offer you some refreshments while you contemplate the drawings, light boxes and external sculptures created specifically for the occasion. The exhibition will be open from June 14th to October 3rd, and together with other cultural activities programmed on the Island, our aim is to make of this tiny island in the heart of New York’s Bay a new cultural reference for the city’s summer artistic scenario.

Each weekend we will also present workshops and debates covering a wide range of disciplines: On July 3rd and July 24th the Conversations at the Island will be held, featuring lectures by Linnaea Tillet and Noam Elcott respectively. Their generic title, Matter/Light, Approaches to Light as a Creative Substance, refer to a concept developed by Angel Orensanz in his most recent work. Linnaea Tillet is an artist, lighting designer and environmental psychologist with extensive experience in public landscape and architecture, light art, fine art and luxury interiors and has been on the faculty of the Masters in Lighting Design Program at Parsons The New School for Design since 1992. Noam Elcott is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University, where he teaches a range of courses on twentieth-century art and photography, focusing on the historical avant-garde and emergent media, as well as Art Humanities.

The video screenings, titled Ars Sublimis and curated by Blanca de la Torre and Juanli Carrión, will be dealing with the validity of the Schopenhauer’s sublime concept in contemporary art. Artists such as Gema Pardo, Susan Collins, Yorgo Alexopoulos and Avelino Sala amongst others will be presenting video-art pieces where the landscape is sometimes seen as a utopic concept or as a medium of creation while in other occasions it is shown as a symbol of destruction or dystopia. Their artwork spans in a remarkable range of styles and interests, but all of them taking into consideration the natural or urban landscape as a canvas suitable for experimenting with it rather than as a sacred and immaculate value impossible to alter with human activity. These video screenings will take place on July 18th and September 12th.

Finally, two consecutive weekends on August 22-23 and 29-30 will be dedicated to workshop activities led by artistic and performance collectives. The Theatre of the Oppressed, an eclectic organization born in Brazil in 1971 that has become international with branches spreading from the Americas to Europe, will present its latest proposals. The Farm Collective will be responsible for a September weekend, which title will be Artivismos and whose goal is to promote Art Activism in two senses: Activism as a promotion of Art as an active fact and concept, more than pure activity or creation and Art as something useful and related to all realms of life; promoting art adapted to everybody – specially anti-elitist – and moreover, art to enjoy.

The exhibition Angel Orensanz, a Little Retrospective, held, as well as the rest of the activities at the island’s building #11, will work as the background of the whole program, running throughout all summer, and the screenings, lectures and workshops will emphasize the relationship between Orensanz’s artwork with other contemporary artists and cultural tendencies. Orensanz Summer Museum’s program is still open to new dates and activities. For any further information, please visit our website www.orensanz.org.