AUSTIN, TX.- From March 30 through July 14, 2019, The Contemporary Austin—led by Executive Director and CEO Louis Grachos—presents an exhibition by artist Abraham Cruzvillegas (born 1968 in Mexico City) at its Jones Center location, 700 Congress Avenue in downtown Austin.

Abraham Cruzvillegas: Hi, how are you, Gonzo? fills both floors of the museum with site-specific, mixed media work in which recycled materials are transformed into abstract sculptural objects. These objects are then used as platforms to engage other artists, community members, and museum visitors as active participants in the artworks, allowing for creativity, experimentation, and social dialogue through collaborative “activations” that complete and transform the works on view.

The exhibition is co-organized by Heather Pesanti, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs at The Contemporary Austin, and Heidi Zuckerman, the Nancy and Bob Magoon CEO and Director of the Aspen Art Museum, where the exhibition will be on view from October 25, 2019, through January 2020.

Abraham Cruzvillegas’s dynamic artistic practice begins with the concept of autoconstrucción—loosely defined as “self-construction,” an idea inspired by the artist’s home outside Mexico City and his interest in transformation, collaboration, and improvisation. Constructed in partnership with both The Contemporary Austin and the Aspen Art Museum, the sculptures in Hi, how are you, Gonzo? begin as a set of sketches and conceptual instructions from Cruzvillegas. The artist asked museum staff at both venues to source recycled or discarded materials such as wood, scrap metal, plastic, found signs, and cardboard and repurpose them to build the sculptures. In the case of this exhibition, The Contemporary Austin and the Aspen Art Museum each gathered materials, and then pooled them together to create the set of artworks. In this way, the sculptures become a tangible link between the two museums and a physical reflection of each city. After the sculptures are constructed, museum staff complete the works by painting them in red and black, with some parts of the original materials exposed. No new materials were to be used to build these assemblage sculptures, which also function as ramps, platforms, stages, seats, tables, and more throughout the life of the exhibition. As the exhibition progresses, the objects will accrue evidence of the performative actions that take place. Through this process, each work of art becomes specific not just to the museum but more broadly to the cities and communities within which they are presented.

“Abraham’s work is, on one hand, playful and humorous, and on the other, quietly anarchist, in the manner in which it breaks down institutional and political boundaries. He is deeply connected to local culture and geography, inspired at the source by the community of collaboratively built structures in his hometown of Ajusco, south of Mexico City, but extending to each of the communities in which he exhibits and works,” said Heather Pesanti. “The participatory nature of Hi, how are you, Gonzo? mirrors Abraham’s own activist spirit, loosely connecting autobiographical elements of the artist’s life, improvisation, and the gestures of others. This collaborative working process, involving museum staff, participants, and community members from Austin, Aspen, and Mexico City, has been deeply meaningful, allowing for an organic and unpredictable evolution of ideas that ultimately might lend itself to both failure and innovation.”

The interactive sculptural works in Abraham Cruzvillegas: Hi, how are you, Gonzo? have been joined by several works on paper. These include large-scale India ink drawings from the artist’s Nuestra imagen actual series, depicting images of primates painted by the artist with brooms on large sheets of painted kraft paper. The exhibition also includes three Blind self-portraits. While these look like minimalist compositions of monochromatic, painted paper and cardboard shapes pin-mounted across the walls, they are in fact collections of artifacts from moments in the artist’s life—tickets, receipts, posters, napkins, etc.—painted over on the front-facing side to obscure their origins and installed in site-specific arrangements.

Heidi Zuckerman, the Nancy and Bob Magoon CEO and Director of the Aspen Art Museum, added, “At the AAM we have long exhibited and fostered works by contemporary artists that invite collaboration, challenge our perceptions of what art can be, and, ultimately, activate audiences’ engagements with them in unexpected and, hopefully, transcendent and joyful ways. Abraham’s works for Hi, how are you, Gonzo? are a multilayered set of just such activations—from his ambitious connections of geographical locales and the shared gathering of its materials on through each community’s ultimate interactions with its resulting objects. As Heather and I both acknowledge as part of this great partnership between our institutions and communities through his efforts, Abraham's works have the potential to raise questions both simple and profound and foster further connections that—while impossible to predict—will nonetheless have resounding and lasting impacts on those who enjoy them within our galleries.”