The Great Hall Exhibitions Archive

There are two Great Hall Exhibitions per year showcasing prominent contemporary artists. Taking place in the fall and spring semesters, the expansive great hall of the Duke House, a historic landmark building, provides an impressive setting for displaying seminal contemporary art in the center of the Institute’s academic home and community.

Spring 2023
Mónica Félix: Estelio

Estelio incorporated both in-person and virtual experiences and two public programs.

Launch Exhibition Spanish Translation Public programming

Mónica Félix, Alláfuera. Still from video performance. Courtesy of the artist.

The Institute of Fine Arts is pleased to announce its spring exhibition, Estelio, featuring work past and present of Puerto Rican artist Mónica Félix. As part of the Great Hall Exhibition series, the exhibition continues a commitment to celebrating the practices of exemplary women artist and is the third in the series to take place online. Fluid like the sea from which Félix draws much of her inspiration, the exhibition will incorporate both in-person and virtual experiences, including the online exhibition opening on March 24 and two public programs. The exhibition will be on view on the Institute’s website from March 24 – June 23. 

The exhibition title, Estelio, is Spanish for “stellium,” an astrological phenomenon in which three or more planets align under a single zodiac sign or house. Each of Félix’s artistic projects becomes a star within the larger constellation of her oeuvre, and the online exhibition acts as the birth chart to which these stars belong, situating them within their full context for the first time. The show’s site takes the form of the birth chart, through which audiences are able to navigate different works as they relate to each of Félix’s own astrological houses.

Projects such as Romance Tropical demonstrate Félix’s engagement with archival resources and what she calls “half-truths.” The series of photographic and video work revolves around the 1934 film of the same name. The second Spanish-language talkie in the world—and the first ever Puerto Rican film with sound—the movie depicted a man’s search for love and riches and his adventure on the “savage island,” Mu. Sometime in the late 1930s, the film vanished. With such an important piece of Puerto Rican media history seemingly gone forever, Félix reimagined—with the script and other archives that were available—the film through a feminist lens, by embodying the two lead female characters and the actresses who portrayed them. In her reimagination, the characters are named after their actresses. Félix’s body—and in turn, the characters’ bodies belonging to the actresses—become the sites for both rapture and doom. Her personas are allowed to feel pain, pleasure, and rebirth in opposition to the original film's repression. When Romance Tropical resurfaced in 2017, Félix reimagined the film once again, this time, adding color to the monochrome film and its white-washed narrative.

The first public program will be an in-person feature-length debut screening of selected video work from as early as 2014. The one-off screening will unify, for the first time, the expansive narrative of Félix’s video practice including excerpts from her works Alláfuera, Aves de Rapiña, Romance Tropical, Vaivén. The second program will be a virtual panel that puts into conversation Félix, Professor Laura Bravo López from the University of Puerto Rico, film director Mariem Pérez, and Professor Juana Suárez, director of the Moving Image Archive and Preservation Program at NYU. 

Mónica Félix (b.1984, Cayey, Puerto Rico) is an interdisciplinary artist, professional photographer, and hatha yoga teacher based in Brooklyn, New York since 2010. She has a BA in Communications from the University of Puerto Rico, a Photography Certificate from Pratt Institute, and a Visual Arts MFA from Columbia University. Félix’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte at the University of Puerto Rico, and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. In 2017, she participated in an art residency in Barcelona where she explored the similarities and contrasts of independence ideals in Puerto Rico and in Catalunya, using self-portraits as her artistic medium. Also in 2017, she was selected to participate in the public art exhibition The Future is Female by SaveArtSpace, in which her objective was to explore and celebrate evolving and intersectional feminist movements with a piece from her 2012 series Reina. Her work focuses on representing the experience of female bodies in migration and a consequential search for identity.

This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of Valeria Napoleone XX.

We extend special thanks to the artist for lending her works on view. Lillian Beeson, Laura Sofía Hernández González, Barbie Kim, and Kaylee Moua Nok curated the exhibition. Jason Varone designed the website and Professors Catherine Quan Damman and Christine Poggi provided faculty support.

About ValeriaNapoleoneXX

ValeriaNapoleoneXX is an umbrella platform for projects and initiatives working towards increasing the recognition and validation of art practices by female artists through collaborations and partnerships with institutions and individuals in the world of contemporary art.

About ValeriaNapoleoneXXIFA

ValeriaNapoleoneXXIFA is an ongoing commitment to underwrite the Great Hall Exhibition Series at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, two solo exhibitions a year focused on the work of female artists.