Estate of Sarah Grilo
Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to present a conversation held on occasion of the late artist Sarah Grilo's first solo exhibition with the gallery, The New York Years, 1962–70, curated by Karen Grimson.
Join curator Karen Grimson in conversation with Mateo Fernández-Muro, grandson of the artist and executor of the Estate of Sarah Grilo, and Phong H. Bui, Co-Founder and Publisher/Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, Rail Editions, River Rail and Rail Curatorial Projects, as they reflect on the visual practice and legacy of Sarah Grilo. The conversation will be held on Saturday, March 9th at 3pm in the gallery.
About the Speakers
Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and Co-Founder and Publisher/Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, Rail Editions, River Rail and Rail Curatorial Projects. Bui has organized more than eighty exhibitions since 2000, including Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, an ongoing curatorial project that was exhibited in 2019 as an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale, at Colby Museum in Waterville, Maine, and Singing in Unison at eight venues across New York in 2022-23. In 2014, Bui was named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture” by Brooklyn Magazine, and in 2015, the New York Observer dubbed him a “ringmaster” of the Kings County art world. From 2007 to 2010 he served as Curatorial Advisor at MoMA PS1. He was a senior critic at Yale MFA, Columbia University MFA, and University of Pennsylvania MFA, and has taught graduate seminars in MFA Writing and Criticism and MFA Photography, Video, and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts. Bui was the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from University of the Arts in 2020 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts in 2021. Bui is a Board Member of International Association of Art Critics (2007-2019), Anthology Film Archives (2017-2023), Denniston Hill, Fountain House, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Monira Foundation, Second Shift Studio Space St. Paul, Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Studio in a School, the Third Rail, and the Center for Fiction.
Mateo Fernández-Muro is the grandson of the artists Sarah Grilo and José Antonio Fernández-Muro, whose estates he also spearheads since 2016. Based in New York, he is a Spanish architect and urban researcher from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Mateo holds a Master of Science in design and urban ecologies from the Parsons School of Design in New York and a Master in Advanced Architectural Projects from ETSA Madrid. He is currently a Senior Associate at PAU (Practice for Architecture and Urbanism), and has previously collaborated with the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and worked with WE ACT for Environmental Justice to develop a community plan for climate resilience in northern Manhattan. Before coming to the city in 2014, he worked with the offices of Álvaro Siza and Rubio & Álvarez-Sala on the development of significant urban design projects. His award-winning participatory action research on the indigenous communes in Quito, Ecuador, was exhibited in the Spanish pavilion of the XVI Venice Biennale of Architecture.
Karen Grimson is a curator and art historian specializing in Latin American abstraction. She holds degrees in art history from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where she developed the MA dissertation that informed the current exhibition Sarah Grilo: The New York Years, 1962-1970 at Galerie Lelong & Co., New York. Between 2011 and 2020, she worked at The Museum of Modern Art, New York developing acquisitions and exhibitions of art from Latin America, such as Joaquín Torres-García: The Arcadian Modern, Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil and Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction—The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift. She taught courses on Brazilian Modernism and contributed articles to the MoMA publications Among Others: Blackness at MoMA, Being Modern: Building the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, and Joaquín Torres-García, as well as the Museum’s online platforms Magazine and post. notes on art in a global context. Her writings have also been published in Artforum, Vistas: Critical Approaches to Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art, and Inti: Revista de literatura hispánica. She is currently the Curator for Craig Robins Collection and Director of Cultural Programming at the Miami Design District.
