Bienvenidos
Welcome to my new blog that will report on books on the visual arts and other related topics that I discover while living in Spain for a year.
My name is Richard Fletcher and I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at Ohio State University, spending my sabbatical-year from August 2014 to July 2015 in Madrid.
When not working on my main area of research (the transmission and translation of ancient Greek philosophy into ancient Roman culture and Latin literature), and my on-going interest in the interface between Classics and Contemporary Art (explored in my other blog), I will post images, brief comments and observations here on the art books I discover in Spain that will link to the Store at the Wexner Center for the Arts back in Columbus, Ohio.
The Wexner Center Store is by far the best place to browse and buy books in Columbus, so while I am away for the year I have arranged to have the books I post about available for sale on their website as well in the store itself - displayed on a table, a specially designated mesa de libros.
The main aim of the blog in connecting the two locations - both Madrid and Columbus specifically, and Spain and the United States in general - as an alternative exploration of a project I am working on with my partner - Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza (OSU Associate Professor in the Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese) called Spain from Here/España desde aquí which explore the phenomenon of artists from Spain who live and work in the US.
During our sabbatical, Rebeka and I will be working with the Center for Ongoing Research and Projects (COR&P) in Columbus on the second instantiation of their Sabbatical series of exhibitions. The year-long exhibition will combine our research on the project sent from Madrid with work sent by a group of Spanish-born artists currently working in Los Angeles (Patricia Fernández Carcedo, Adrià Julià and Erlea Maneros Zabala) in a specially designed COR&P outpost on the 2nd floor of Hagerty Hall, in the lobby outside the OSU Department of Spanish & Portuguese main office.
Given that the Wexner Center Store also sells publications by COR&P, this blog Mesa de Libros will also act as a way of promoting the Sabbatical exhibition as well.
Given this, I want to end this first post with a photograph used in a work by one of the artists in the Sabbatical exhibition - Patricia Fernández Carcedo. It shows her father in front of Picasso’s Guernica during its time in exile at MoMA in New York.
Patricia Fernández Carcedo, El Guernica, New York, 1978