CEAM Artist Residency 2022: Pablo Vindel

The CEAM Artist Residency 2022 organized by the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain and the Crips-Eller Art Museum offers a unique experience for Spanish visual artists in the city of St Augustine.

Thanks to the collaboration between the CEAM Artist Residency at Flagler College and the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain in Washington D.C., Spain-based artist and writer Pablo Vindel has joined the Spring artists-in-residence program in March 2022.

In keeping with the CEAM Artist Residency’s commitment to provide support to interdisciplinary artists who collaborate with various aspects of St. Augustine’s local community, this new partnership with the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain hopes to connect the Spanish history of the city of St. Augustine with contemporary Spanish art by providing an emerging Spanish artist with the opportunity to connect and explore with the rich cultural ecosystem of St Augustine.

As part of the residency, Pablo Vindel engaged in multiple activities to share and display his work and ideas, participating in an artist talk and various workshops in St. Augustine.

Pablo Vindel

Pablo Vindel (Spain, 1990) is a visual artist and writer. His work has been featured internationally in solo and group exhibitions, as well as art fairs. Most notably these include, the NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, ArtsLibris at ARCOLisboa, Orlando Museum of Art and Lab36|Galeria SENDA (Barcelona).

Vindel has completed artist residencies in Brazil, Chile, India, Spain, Turkey, and the U.S. His work has been published by Naranja Publicaciones and can be found at the MoMA Library Artist Book Collection, Walker Art Center, 10×10 Photobooks and Datz Museum of Art (Gwangjun, South Korea), among others.

In 2020, he founded The Liminal, gallery and producer of contemporary art focusing on women and queer artists. He holds an M.F.A. from the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016), as well as an M.F.A. in Creative Writing – Poetry in the Expanded Field from Stetson University (2018).

He currently lives and works in Valencia, Spain.

St. Augustine was an unforeseen detour from my usual pathway as both welcome interruption and opening opportunity and as a transformative drift inevitably bound to the bodies of water and the beds of strata –physical, virtual, and historical– where the city rests. Following a logic revolving around this set of liquid impressions, my one-month residency became a conduit for various waters: storm, brook, river, estuary, ocean; also pondering, new friendship, excitement, and departure.

I spent my time reading art essays on in-between spaces and armatures that I came across during my trip from Spain to the U.S., poetry collections I brought, and widely illustrated touristic brochures I found in every city milestone. Visits to the Lighthouse, the Historical Society Research Library, the Oldest House Museum Complex, presentations at Flagler College, and studio visits with students completed a heterogeneous input in form and content.

As part of my research process, the opportunity to deliver an artist talk at the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum that I titled ‘under a sky of lichens’ (based on the last words of a very recent autofiction collection on queerness and loss, which I am currently working on) and to carry out two experimental workshops based on the artist’s book, both at the museum and the St. Augustine Art Association became the catalyzer for the mentioned streams to find new riverbeds and for a new body of work – sculptural and text-based - to start materializing offsite, now in Valencia.

Additionally, the invitation to realize a solo show in 2024 at CEAM is a great motivation to dive deeper into the complex and dense layers of history I encountered in St. Augustine while making new associations with my narratives and spaces of intimacy.

I can only express great gratitude and excitement to Julie Dickover, director of the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, the Art Department’s Faculty at Flagler College, and the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain in the U.S. for this residency, at once surprising, fruitful, and unorthodox in the best possible ways.

—Pablo Vindel