Pedro Lasch, associate research professor of visual arts, conducted two workshops on November 23, 2014 at the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian Latino Center in Washington, D.C. on “Portraiture, Citizenship, and Abstraction – A Site-Specific Social Art Project.”

Taking the form of a 90-minute workshop, this social art project for youth, teens and college students of all ages focused on new ways of thinking about identity and culture. During the workshop, participants used Lasch’s specially designed mirror masks to connect the collections of the National Portrait Gallery with personal concerns, as well as broader topics like abstraction and social justice.

Planned in conjunction with the Portraiture Now: Staging the Self exhibition, this program is a collaboration between the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian Latino Center and is sponsored in part by the Reinsch Family Education Endowment.

On December 6 Lasch will conduct another workshop at the Hirshhorn Museum on “ARTWORKS for Teachers: Rethink Collaborative Art-Making.”



These participatory works are part of a larger Provisions Research Center project by Lasch, including organized interventions at George Mason University (March 2014), The National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian Latino Center (November 2014), The Hirshhorn Museum (December 2014), and additional sites throughout Washington, D.C. (January and February 2015). The project will conclude with a bilingual publication that catalogs twelve years of archival materials from Pedro Lasch’s Naturalizations series (2002-2014), as well as the new works created in the U.S. capital. The book will include scholarly, pedagogical and curatorial perspectives of guest co-authors whose work addresses wider concerns regarding art and social change, the politics of memory, portraiture, citizenship and abstraction, all amplified in the charged cultural and political landscape of Washington DC.

More on Lasch’s Naturalizations project can be found here: [ link ]