Mother Tongues: Exhibition Opening

Please join artist Alva Mooses and friends as we open the exhibition Mother Tongues--a celebration of visual art, music, poetry, and experimental translation across these media that will stir the senses and our collective imagination. Mooses' visual art dovetails with the literary and visual art of Mirene Arsanios, Aracelis Girmay, and Cecilia Vicuña in the exhibition. 

To open the show, we will share the sounds of Mooses' sculptures as they are 'played' by musicians Carmen Maldonado, Ukiah Mooses, and Armando Rosales in an improvisational music set. We will hear poetry and words by contributing writers while immersed in the Grand Lobby artwork.

Reservations are required as this program takes place after library closure.

Learn more about the exhibition Mother Tongues

 

Alva Mooses is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, printmaking, and ceramics. She holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from Yale University. She has exhibited her work in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe, and has completed fellowships and residencies at the Lower East Side Printshop, Socrates Sculpture Park, Center for Book Arts, Greenwich House Pottery, The University of Chicago, Tou Trykk in Stavanger, Norway, and SOMA in Mexico City, among others. Her recent projects received support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Research Foundation of CUNY. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

 

 

Ukiah Mooses is a violinist, sound artist, and costume design student based in Chicago. Currently pursuing a degree in costume design at DePaul University, she is engaged in exploring the intersection of music and performance art, particularly through the fusion of sound and costume.

 

 

 

 

Carmen Maldonado is a Mexican percussionist interested in blending arts and sciences. Focuses on theatrical music, she creates images from the timbral possibilities of objects, sometimes called instruments, characterizing the audible with gestures and movements.

 

 

Armando Rosales is a sculptor and experimental percussionist whose work explores the intersections of the intimate, institutional, and political. Through sculpture and installation, he examines materiality, sound, and performance, questioning how forces shaping behavior connect to the body as a site of learning and transformation. Drawing from psychology, science, sound, kinetics, and textiles, his practice investigates self-representation and its ties to cultural frameworks, creating spaces of fusion, tension, and speculation. Born in Cabimas, Venezuela, Rosales studied Design at the University of Zulia and participated in programs such as SOMA (2016), the Art & Law Program by Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento at AAP Cornell (2019), and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2024). He has exhibited internationally at venues such as Westwerk in Hamburg, TEA Tenerife in Spain, Museo de Chopo, Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, N.A.D.A. in New York and Miami, NASAL, Abra Caracas, and Oficina #1. Since 2015, he has lived and worked in Mexico City.