Tango Opera

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Po i n t o f C on ta c t & S yra cuse Oper a p re se n t

Tango-Opera celebrates Point of Contact Gallery’s opening in downtown Syracuse. This inaugural event showcases the 20-piece grand folio art book Tango (Iris Editions 1991), a collaborative work by Argentine writer Pedro Cuperman, and New York artist Nancy Graves. A significant work in Point of Contact’s collection, Tango includes eight intaglio prints by Graves and thirteen pages of text by Cuperman.

For this special event Point of Contact teams up with Syracuse Opera to present a live performance, María de Buenos Aires composed by the legendary Astor Piazzolla.

Tango In 1991 the artist [Nancy Graves] collaborated with the writer Pedro Cuperman on Tango, a large folio published

by Iris Editions in New York with eight intaglio prints by Graves and thirteen pages of text by Cuperman that celebrate the social and physical intricacies of the Latin American Dance that gives the folio its name.

With master printer Deli Sacilotto, Graves worked for the first time with the technique of direct gravure. The artist drew images of a snake, playing mantises, lice, a lyrebird, fossils of prehistoric birds, a carp, orchids, and beetles on sheets of frosted acetate. These were transferred to a copperplate using sensitized carbon tissues and then etched to reproduce the tones of the original drawings. Graves subsequently worked on the plates directly with aquatint and drypoint, selectively burnishing them with a power tool and/or employing spit biting to modulate the tones.

Graves conceived of the prints in the folio as a continued exploration of pattern in nature and as a tonal study of black and white. The artist calls Logic of Neon Sign the “white print,� and in it Graves worked to bring out as much of the off-white ground of the paper as possible between the articulated frames of the two praying mantises that cut diagonally across the sheet.

On the opposite end of the tonal scale is Tracing Its

Own Footsteps, in which a feathery border resembling graphite powder, produced by means of etching and aquatinting rice on the copperplate, surrounds the image of a flea that Graves repeated four times (again recalling Muybridge) and echoed in the collage like photogravure laminated to the support at the upper right. If the rich, vaporous shades of black and gray are reminiscent of Paleolinea, it is no coincidence. Graves even commented that with Tango she had come “full circle” from the earlier print. More than once the artist has asserted, “There is nothing more challenging and meaningful than to make prints in black and white.”

For an admitted colorist, it is ironic that the nine prints Graves has made in black and white are among her most powerful. The cryptic titles of the prints in the folio were selected by Graves from Cuperman’s text for Tango. The poet speaks of the dance as a gradually unfolding ritual, stating near the conclusion, “Tango helps you find your own levels of proximity.”

The human figure is conspicuously absent in Grave’s illustrations for Tango, but her choice of plants and animals, combined with her anthropomorphic titles, speaks of humanity’s interrelationship with other forms of nature.

Thomas Padon Nancy Graves, Excavations in Print A Catalogue Raisonné, 1996

Nancy G r a v e s

American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and filmmaker known for her focus on natural phenomena. Graves’ most famous sculpture, Camels, was first displayed in the Whitney Museum of American Art, making her the first woman to have a solo exhibition there. In 1974, she was part of a show titled American Art in Upstate New York, which came to the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, among several others around the region.

P ed ro Cup er m a n

Poet, novelist, founder and editor of Point of Contact (1975); Associate Professor Latin American literature, critical theory, and semiotics at Syracuse University.

Cuperman wrote extensively in Nancy Graves: Icons of Language (1990): “With Nancy Graves, distance is syntax. What appears as chaotic stream, heterogeneous and arbitrary, coalesces as metaphor: a visualized plenum.�

Ma r ía d e B uenos Ai re s By now, anyone even vaguely familiar with tango music must know the name of Astor Piazzolla. The Argentine composer and bandoneon master, who died in 1992 at age 71, proved definitively that tango music can flourish not only as accompaniment to dance but as a concert art form unto itself.

No single work by Piazzolla, however, makes that point more emphatically than the composer’s lone opera, María de Buenos Aires, a heady, surreal piece.

Here is Piazzolla at his most artistically ambitious, transcending tango conventions even as he celebrates them, pushing past the idiom’s harmonic and rhythmic boundaries.

Designed to lure listeners with the seductive sway of tango, then take them far from the origins of the music, María de Buenos Aires amounts to Piazzolla’s most imposing statement in the genre. Tango and Western classical music intertwine in this score, Piazzolla achieving in María what Duke Ellington did in Black, Brown and Beige or George Gershwin in Porgy and Bess: bringing a noble folk music into the realm of extended, rigorous composition. Until you’ve heard María de Buenos Aires, you have not taken the full measure of Piazzolla’s genius.

Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune August, 2011

Cat alina Cue rv o

Colombian born Catalina Cuervo brings fire to the character of María in María de Buenos Aires with her captivating presence and powerful voice. She has been cast as María in over seven productions presented in six different cities across the nation. Catalina earned a Masters in Music from Roosevelt’s Chicago College of Performing Arts, training in the studio of renowned Soprano Judith Haddon. She was also a featured Young Artist at the Chicago Opera Theater.

S t aff Pedro Cuperman Artistic Director and Curator Miranda Traudt Managing Director Megan Sauve Managing Assistant Rainer Wehner Preparator Kathryn Kelly Designer Shelby Zink Designer Rose Picon Communications Coordinator Allison Hinman Assistant Preparator Tere Paniagua

Executive Director Cultural Engagement College of Arts and Sciences Syracuse University

t. 315.443.2169 www.puntopoint.org

Gallery Hours Monday- Friday 12pm-4pm or by appointment