Ruth Estevéz and Liz Magic Laser

Ruth Estévez

Ruth Estévez is a writer, artist, and curator whose practice engages institutional archives and historical research, interweaving them with personal perspectives and interdisciplinary narratives. Her work explores how power is constructed and represented, particularly through language and gesture. She is currently Co-Director of Skowhegan and serves on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Previously, she was co-curator of the 34th São Paulo Biennial (2021). From 2017 to 2020, she organized the performance festival Idiorrhythmic at MACBA in Barcelona, and from 2012 to 2018 she served as Director of REDCAT/CalArts in Los Angeles. Estévez holds an MFA in Video and Performance from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and an MA in Art History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Her lecture-performances and collective readings have been presented at venues including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York.

Liz Magic Laser

Liz Magic Laser is a New York-born multimedia artist working in video, performance, sculpture, and installation. Her projects trace the aesthetics and theatricality of power, examining how authority is rehearsed and performed across political, corporate, journalistic, and medical systems. Her ongoing installation cycle Convulsive States explores hysteria, Jean-Martin Charcot, and the entanglement of performance with the early histories of psychiatry and neurology. The project has been presented in various forms at Pioneer Works, Tate Modern, The Watermill Center, the Denver Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art / Samtidskunst, Denmark, and the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, where the central film was shot. Her work has also been presented at Centre Pompidou, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Mudam Luxembourg, and Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. Sternberg Press published her monograph Public Relations / Öffentlichkeitsarbeit in 2014, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times. Forthcoming projects will be presented at STUK, Leuven, Playbill, Amsterdam and MACBA, Barcelona, in 2027. Laser received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University (2008), where she has often taught Performance Art. She is faculty at School of Visual Arts Photography, Video and Related Media MFA program and has served on the faculty of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.

Photo credit for Liz Magic Laser's headshot: Paula Court

Photo credit for Ruth Estévez's headshot: Ruth Estévez