Co-curated by Brenda Torres-Figueroa and Alejandra Rosa, the project entitled “Residual: To Leave Without a Trace” (September 26 – November 22, 2025) gathers Afro-Puerto Rican performance artists that explore memory, disappearance, and embodied resistance. As part of the “Residual” exhibition and programming, with support from Tiznando el país (backed by the Mellon Foundation) and the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative, their next guest artist is Awilda Sterling Duprey, who will speak and perform at community arts workshop El Schomburg, in Chicago, Illinois. The event takes place on Wednesday, October 15, 2025, from 6:00 to 9:00pm. [The event is free and open to the public. RSVP by texting 312-646-8278.]
Awilda Sterling-Duprey (Puerto Rico, 1947) is an Afro Caribbean visual, installation, and performance artist. She became interested in Abstract Expressionism in the 60’s through Franz Kline’s Black Paintings. Conceptual Art and Dada became major influences on her visual work with Caribbean religious dance traditions. Sterling studied at Pratt Institute in the late 1970s, a time when performance had become accepted as a means of artistic expression in its own right. Sterling keeps searching and integrating her sense of Afro Caribbean-ness with an emphasis on the pictorial and the quotidian. She is a 2010 USA Artist Fellow and a 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellow. Sterling is the recipient of awards and artist’s residencies including: EL Resuelve, El Serrucho (2017; 2019); Tree of Life Artists Grant (2018); El cuadrado gris (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Puerto Rico (2020); USA Artists Relief Grant (2020); and the MASS MoCA Artists Residency (Summer 2023). Her most recent practice consists of dance improvisations while drawing blindfolded (exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, 2022).
For more information, see www.elschomburg.com
Also see https://thevisualist.org/2025/09/residual-irse-sin-dejar-rastro/