Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Guillermo Bert was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1959. His bi-cultural experience provides him with a lived perspective from which his artistic expression is cultivated. Bert combines his decades-long practice of working with cultural symbols of urbanism, consumerism and displacement.
In this talk, Bert will focus on recent artistic projects, including his Encoded Textiles series. Working with traditional weavers, he creates QR codes woven into textile designs. These “high tech” codes, when scanned with a smartphone, take the viewer into a filmic world of story, myth and reflection by indigenous elders, activists and poets. Collaborating with Mapuche, Navajo, Maya, Mixtec and Zapotec weavers, he has done more than 40 embedded documentary films that “de-code” cultural messaging and create a bond between the distant viewer and the intimacy of the community of indigenous artists and storytellers.
About Guillermo Bert
Guillermo Bert’s career as an artist and arts educator has taken many forms, from art director of the Los Angeles Times to professor of Mixed Media at the Art Center School of Design in California. Bert’s work has been featured in exhibitions at the Nevada Museum of Art, Museum of Latin American Art, Museum of Art and Design, Craft & Folk Museum, Palm Springs Museum of Art, and more. He is a recipient of the California Community Foundation Fellowship, Center for Cultural Innovation Award, Master Artist Grant from the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, and the COLA Master Artist Fellowship by the City of Los Angeles.
How to Participate
To participate, register online to get a link and instructions for joining the program on Zoom. Simply follow that link at the time the event starts (6 p.m. EDT). When you register, you can also request to receive a reminder email one day before the program with the link included.
About the Contemporary Voices Series
Meet innovative artists and scholars whose practice draws on textile materials, techniques or knowledge. This series is presented in partnership with the Textile Society of America.
More info here: https://museum.gwu.edu/contemporary-voices-guillermo-bert
Image Credit: Guillermo Bert, “Mapuche Portal #1” (detail), 2015. Photo by Ronald Dunlap.
