Francis Alÿs with James Oles

Francis Alÿs, artist featured in México Inside Out: Themes in Art Since 1990, in conversation with James Oles, scholar of the art and architecture of Mexico

For this Tuesday Evenings presentation, Belgium-born and Mexico City–based artist Francis Alÿs is in conversation with art historian James Oles, discussing relationships between the artist’s early and current work.

Alÿs is one of the most important contemporary artists working today, with a practice that embraces multiple media, spanning painting, sculpture, photography, and film. Having exhibitions throughout the United States, Latin America, and Europe—including dOCUMENTA (13) and, most recently, a two-part exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo—Alÿs’s extraordinary practice has been lauded by many. Mark Godfrey, in his opening essay for Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception, a major survey that opened at Tate Modern in London and closed at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2011, writes, “What makes Francis Alÿs’s practice one of the most compelling in recent art is that he manages to find poetic and imaginative ways to address the urgent political and economic crises of contemporary life.”

Oles divides his time between Mexico City and suburban Boston, where he teaches Latin American art at Wellesley College and serves as adjunct curator of Latin American art at the Davis Museum, where Alÿs was given his first one-man show in the Boston area in 2012. Oles has most recently written a survey textbook, Art and Architecture in Mexico, published by Thames and Hudson.

Alÿs and Oles have been friends for over two decades, and this relationship, as well as their obvious insight into Alÿs’s work, makes this a special presentation that also serves as a preview for México Inside Out: Themes in Art Since 1990, which opens to the public on September 15.