Art is never
the object alone.
Anne-Laure Lemaitre shapes places
where makers and viewers belong.
There is more to a territory than its geographical location. A territory has a smell, a sound, an atmosphere, a light that distinguishes it from any other place on earth. When evoking tropical insular spaces, we tend to reduce them to a series of attractive attributes, brushing off their complex historical and social specificities. An island is by definition isolated, separated from any other land by its coastal shores. But far from being solely focused inwards, these enclaves have been predominant sites of cultural hybridization and cross-pollination. Islands are a meeting point. Both an in-between and a destination.
La Isla de Barro offers as premise the creation of a fantasized world where two artists’ personal obsessions and narratives, anchored in their distinctive history and relationship to a homeland drawn from memories, recollections or tales, blend into an immersive scene of wonder. Expanding off the wall, both practices build further on their makers’ deeply rooted connection to an emotional geography they recognize as their own.
Recontextualizing their distinctive cultural specificities, Amy Bravo and Albert Peguero each explore their unique bond to their homeland in subjective ways. While Amy Bravo uses symbolism, memorabilia, recounted familial histories and ownership of self as a means to reinvent a fantastic, intimate vision of Cuba, Albert Peguero adopts the traditional building aesthetic from his native Dominican Republic to create playful and surreal functional structures which interrogate the shared experience of working class immigrants. For the exhibition, both practices are put in contextual dialogue as to create a dynamic space the viewer can immerse themself in.
The tale La Isla de Barro narrates is one of radical pluralities and possible reinventions. It outlines a world in which monolithic representations and assumptions are refuted by uncompromisingly linking intimacy, legacy and territory. It celebrates singularity as a vital component of a greater universal story and offers a nuanced perspective on belonging as a state of being.
Photo: Alexander Laurent Rubalcava
Anne-Laure Lemaitre is a curator, writer, and producer based in New York, Paris, and the Nova Scotia wilderness. Her practice begins by questioning a territory: its physical and emotional dimensions, its history, its context, its belonging, before turning to the art it calls for. This orientation has shaped a body of work spanning the most experimental corners of the emerging art world and leading corporations and public institutions.
Many artists she has worked with early in their careers have since gone on to significant critical and market recognition. Those relationships rarely end with the exhibition. For several, she remains a resource: someone to think with, exchange with, workshop with.
For nearly twenty years, she has worked across scales and contexts: from intimate solo exhibitions at artist-run spaces to permanent public commissions, from single-artist career conversations to cultural programs spanning five continents. Her practice is built around the specific rather than the repeatable, treating the space, the institution, the sidewalk, and the online environment each as curatorial material in its own right.
Lemaitre writes regularly about art for catalogues, publications, and for herself. Her writing, whether commissioned or not, tends toward the felt rather than the prescribed: a belief that how we speak about a practice, and what it does to us, shapes how it is seen and received.
Intentional art programs · Site-specific commissions
Curatorial strategy · International practice
Art In Context is a curatorial production practice whose work ranges from international public commissions, corporate collections and multi-venue cultural strategies to ongoing collaborations with artists, brands and cultural institutions.
Every project begins with the same questions: what does this place need, what story belongs here, and who should tell it. That orientation shapes everything from artist selection and fabrication to the logic of how a program holds together in one location or across multiple sites.
Drawing on nearly twenty years of work, Art In Context has built the infrastructure to operate anywhere and at any scale. An extensive network of creative partners allows it to move from a single commission to a coordinated program spanning dozens of sites without losing the specificity that makes a project land. Art In Context works worldwide.