In Conversation: Troy Montes Michie and Prof. Catherine S. Ramírez
September 24, 2022 2:00 pm–3:00 pm

In celebration of the opening weekend of Troy Montes Michie: Rock of Eye at the Contemporary Arts Museum-Houston, please join us for a conversation between the artist Troy Montes Michie and Dr. Catherine S. Ramírez (Professor and Chair of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory) for a discussion about their shared investments in histories of the zoo suit in Latinx communities and gendered forms of self-fashioning.

2:00pm-3:00pm CST

Location:
Contemporary Arts Museum-Houston
5216 Montrose Boulevard
Houston, TX 77006
713-284-8250
info@camh.org

RSVPs via Eventbrite are encouraged as seats in the auditorium are limited. Advance tickets will be made available to CAMH members at an early date, while the remaining tickets will be made available to the public on Monday, September 5, 2022 at 11AM CST. Please review CAMH’s safety protocols on their website. Seating will be socially distanced and masks are encouraged to be worn throughout the event. If there are questions or concerns regarding safety or accessibility, please contact ytorres@camh.org.

Visual artist Troy Montes Michie was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. He received his B.F.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso and his M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Shed, the New Museum, The Momentary, the VCU Institute of Contemporary Art, the Metropolitan Arts Centre Belfast, the New Museum, the Contemporary Arts Museum-Houston, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY. His work is a part of the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Ulster Museum in Belfast. He is the recipient of an Art Matters grant and has participated in residencies at Recess Art, the Skowhegan School of Painting, and the Fine Arts Work Center. As a 2020-21 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, he researched self-fashioning and camouflage theory as a guide to describe the ways in which bodies can become alternately erased and fetishized, made invisible and hyper-visible.

Catherine S. Ramírez, Professor and Chair of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a scholar of Latinx literature, visual culture, history, and performance; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; comparative ethnic studies; migration; and speculative fiction. She is the author of Assimilation: An Alternative History, The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Duke University Press, 2020), and several essays on science fiction, race, gender, and futurity. She is a co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (Rutgers University Press, 2021) and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Public Books, and Boom California. In addition to being awarded UC Santa Cruz’s ‘Excellence in Teaching Award,’ she has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. A first-generation college graduate, she holds a PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.

IMAGE: Installation shot of Troy Montes Michie: Rock of Eye at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, CA, 2022. Photo: Elon Schoenholz.