The Georgette and Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts is an annual artist-in-residency program that brings prominent artists to teach at the Hartford Art School. During his tenure as the 2023-24 Koopman Chair in the Printmaking Department, Jonathan Herrera Soto has taught classes designed to prioritize the process of experimentation and play, focusing on collecting the misprints, which are often mistranslated in attempts to render an idea manifest. His pedagogical approach focuses on the little things: sketches, mistakes, uncertainties, and unfinished thoughts—an archive from which we learn and grow.
His solo exhibition in Joseloff Gallery, Twice the Legal Minute, brings together objects, memories, and systems that exist on the periphery of society to explore the visual language of accumulation, debris, and neglect. This exploration plays out at the scale of individual artworks—in the treatment of rust as paint, for example—and in the gallery at large through Herrera Soto’s distinctive approach to arranging installations. Akin to the layering of information that is fundamental to printmaking, the lessons to be drawn from Herrera Soto’s praxis are many, from the stakes of (mis)translation to plausibility as a survival strategy. Visit the HAS Galleries website to learn more about the exhibit, on view through March 23.
On Wednesday, March 20, at 5 p.m., Jonathan Herrera Soto will give a talk in Wilde Auditorium, followed by the Koopman Community Dinner. The buffet-style dinner starts at 6:30 p.m., in the 1877 Club, following the artist talk.
Reservations are required, for more information please email Amanda Lusteg at lusteg@hartford.edu.