D.C. Performance Art

Washington Project for the Arts and the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art + Design present Maid in the USA a performance by Carolina Mayorga presented as part of Take It to the Bridge. The performance will take place on Saturday, September 1, from 10am-5pm.

Maid in the USA examines stereotypes of Latin American immigrants and makes visible labor that often goes unseen. Clad in a dress typically worn for Cumbia, a traditional Colombian dance, the artist will clean the inside of the glass structure surrounding the Performance Bridge, from the Museum’s opening at 10am until its 5pm closing. Coinciding with Labor Day and utilizing the Performance Bridge’s transparency, the artist exposes work that is often hidden from view or simply ignored.

Installed 9 feet above the ground, within the museum’s glass entryway, the Performance Bridge creates a transparent glass box, visible from both the street and the museum’s interior. This seemingly neutral space evokes the use of the cube throughout 20^th and 21^stcentury visual art, from the white cube gallery environment to the neutral cubes of Minimalist sculpture. Mayorga disrupts this supposedly neutral space, foregrounding issues of race, immigration, and labor. While the work necessary to maintain these pristine, neutral spaces normally goes unseen, Mayorga calls attention to this labor and our assumptions about the people who perform it.

Mayorga’s assumption of the maintenance role harkens back to earlier performance work, most specifically Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto for Maintenance Art (1969) andHartford Wash: Washing Tracks, Maintenance Outside (1973),which involved the artist scrubbing the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT. Mayorga builds on this canonical work of feminist performance art, engaging with contemporary issues surrounding labor, immigration, and visibility.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Carolina Mayorga is an artist working in a broad range of media, including video, performance, photography, and installation. She has had one-person exhibitions in Colombia, Mexico, at the University of Kansas and in the Washington D.C. area and participated in group exhibitions in Europe, Central and South America, and numerous cities in The United States. Her work is represented in the collections of the Art Museum of the Americas of the Organization of American States and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C., Light Street Gallery, Baltimore, MD, Andres Institute of Art, Brookline, NH, Museum of New Art, Pontiac, MI, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia, and Kronan Sculpture Park, Lulea, Sweden. Mayorga received a BFA in Art and Textiles from Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia and a MFA in sculpture from the University of Kansas, Lawrence Kansas. She lives and works in Washington, DC.

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