william cordova
North Miami Beach, FL
william cordova received the Creative Capital Award in 2024. william cordova’s practice has been motivated by a creative engagement in architecture, geometry and history to illuminate and shape themes of resistance in our collective landscape.
Education: BFA, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; MFA, Yale University, New Haven, CT. william cordova’s practice has been motivated by a creative engagement in architecture, geometry and history. These are essential components in Cordova’s life and have shaped his world view. He is an interdisciplinary cultural practitioner interested in the roots of abstraction, history of textile encoding and non-linear narratives. Cordova illuminates the synthesis of memory, ritual and mythology to further disrupt, challenge and reassess definitions of our collective landscape. His site-specific installation work is both expansive and intimate. Intersecting the economy of materials with ephemeral and spatial rhythms. Juxtaposing social political theories with Third Cinema strategies that frame the unframed thus manifesting subversive visual aesthetics. Cordova has held residencies at Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Project Row Houses, The American Academy in Berlin, Germany, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Artpace, Headlands Art Center. He is also an award recipient from the Knight Foundation, Art Matters, Guggenheim Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Michael Richards Grant.
Events
- william cordova: can’t stop, won’t stop (geometria sagrada) February 9-March 16, 2024
cordova, stand up next 2 a mountain: unknown narratives of Latino members of the Black Panther Party, 2023. Courtesy william cordova
cordova, stand up next 2 a mountain: unknown narratives of Latino members of the Black Panther Party, 2023. Courtesy william cordova
cordova, stand up next 2 a mountain: unknown narratives of Latino members of the Black Panther Party, 2023. Courtesy william cordova. Photo Courtesy Roz Payne, 1969
cordova, stand up next 2 a mountain: unknown narratives of Latino members of the Black Panther Party (Fred Solitaire Fernandez). Courtesy william corodva, 2022
cordova, stand up next 2 a mountain: unknown narrative of Latino Black Panther Party members, 2023
stand up next 2 a mountain
william cordova’s practice has been motivated by a creative engagement in architecture, geometry and history to illuminate and shape themes of resistance in our collective landscape.
Artist Biostand up next 2 a mountain: unknown narratives of Latino members of the Black Panther Party is a video and audio documentation illuminating the unknown history of Latino members of the Black Panther Party (1966-1982), whose public history and personal narratives remain completely unknown but whose roles and contributions further add to the complexity of Race, gender, ethnicity and cultural paradigm. Russian filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky described cinema as a way of “sculpting in time”. This video, audio documentation would evolve as an ephemeral monument, installation or projections including interviews and hardcopy documents from 1960s-1970s FBI and underground media. “I want to reach into the past and reconstruct the present and create spaces and details in which there are no ‘invisible people’” stated architect Coleman A. Jordan about the invisible histories of African Americans in Autobio-graphic Space: Reconciling African American Identity with the (In)visible Past).
This project is unique in that it is an ephemeral repository of Latino women and men whose roles in the BPP were groundbreaking and pivotal in achieving a broader interpretation of Blackness in the US and abroad. Personal interviews would be conducted with surviving members including former Asian and Native American members. This project would serve as an example of an organization, the BPP, that was richly empowered through its ranks with diversity and whose sense of self determination is still being unraveled.