San Diego Visual Arts Network Awards Two SDSU Professors 2022 San Diego Art Prize
SDSU School of Art + Design Lecturer Amy Sanchez Arteaga and Associate Professor Carlos Castro Arias honored for their artistic work
Cognate Collective
by Allison Cone
March 26, 2022
San Diego Visual Arts Collective announced the winners of the 2022 San Diego Art Prize; two SDSU professors in the School of Art and Design were presented the honor, consisting of a cash prize and exhibition opportunities. The SD Art Prize awards artists from the San Diego region who encourage important dialogue and reflect San Diego's cultural and artistic life through their work.
Painting and Printmaking Professor Carlos Castro Arias, and Art History Lecturer Amy Sanchez Arteaga from Cognate Collective were two of four winners selected for the prize.
Winners were selected by an international panel of curators, including:
Sanchez Arteaga and Misael Diaz make up Cog•nate Collective, an art and research collaborative based in the Baja/Alta California borderlands. Since 2010, their multimedia art has focused on the evolution and increased militarization of the United States Mexico border.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - Jovanna Venegas, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art
Whitney Museum, New York - Marcela Guerrero, Assistant Curator
Frost Art Museum, Florida - Amy Galpin, Chief Curator
Mexico City & Vienna, Austria - José Springer, Independent Curator
Professor Carlos Castro Arias is a Columbian sculpture artist who explores individual and collective identity to bring light to histories muted by oppressive majority cultures.
The SD Art Prize annual exhibit will be displayed at the Central Library Art Gallery in downtown San Diego from Friday, Sept. 9 to Sunday, Sept. 11, 2022.
About the Artists
Carlos Castro Arias, is a Colombian artist, professor, and musician. His practice departs from the appropriation of historical images and the formal and symbolic re-contextualization of found objects. Castro’s work explores elements of the individual and collective identity and aims to bring to light muted histories and ignored points of view. He received a BA from the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, Bogota, in 2002; in 2008 he attained a Fulbright Scholarship to go to San Francisco Art Institute, where he got an MFA in Painting in 2010. Castro currently works as an associate professor at San Diego State University. In the last seven years alone, the artwork of Carlos Castro Arias has been featured in nine solo exhibitions and more than forty invitational group exhibitions. Those venues include museums and galleries in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, France, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Spain, Sweden, the United States, and Venezuela.
Cog•nate Collective develops research projects, public interventions, and experimental pedagogical programs in collaboration with communities across the US/Mexico border region. Since beginning their collaboration in 2010, their work has interrogated the evolution of the border as it is simultaneously erased by neoliberal economic policies and bolstered through increased militarization. It has traced the fallout of this incongruence for migrant communities on either side of the border. As a result, their inter-disciplinary projects often address issues of citizenship, migration, informal economies, and popular culture, arguing for understanding the border as a region that expands and contracts with the movement of people and objects. They have exhibited work locally and internationally at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Getty Center, The Craft Contemporary, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, FLACSO Arte Actual in Quito, Ecuador, and the Organ Kritischer Kunst in Berlin, Germany. Regionalia, a monograph of their work was published by X Artists' Books in 2020. Cog•nate Collective is a collaboration between Misael Diaz, Assistant Professor of Art, Media, and Design at California State University, San Marcos, and Amy Sanchez Arteaga, Lecturer of Art History at San Diego State University. Their practice is currently based in National City, CA, and they work between Tijuana, BC, and Los Angeles, CA.
The content within this article has been edited by Lizbeth Persons.
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