Julia P. Herzberg is an art historian, independent curator, and Fulbright Senior Specialist living in New York. She completed her PhD in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, in 1998, with a dissertation on Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. She is a specialist of Latin American artists living in the United States, and has curated more than twenty-five exhibitions. Herzberg was a co-curator of The Decade Show (1990), held in New York at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, the New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and she was the curator of the official U.S. representation for the III Bienal Internacional de Pintura in Cuenca, Ecuador (1991). In addition to serving as a consulting curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York (1996–2001), she was a consulting curator for the 2003, 2006, and 2009 Bienales de La Habana, and she is a contributing and consulting editor for Arte al día Internacional. Herzberg has taught, lectured, and published extensively in the United States and abroad and received two J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board awards: one at the Pontificia Universidad Católica (2007) and another at the Universidad Diego Portales (2013), both in Santiago, Chile, and also served as a visiting professor at the Instituto de Arte, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile (2016).
Raquel Rabinovich (b. 1929, Buenos Aires) is an upstate New York–based Argentine American artist best known for her monochromatic drawings and paintings, large glass sculptures, and site-specific stone sculpture interventions in nature. Born to a Romanian-Jewish immigrant family in Buenos Aires, she was raised in Córdoba, Argentina, was held as a political prisoner under the first of Juan Domingo Perón’s regimes (1945–55) and moved immediately to Europe (Paris, Edinburgh, and Copenhagen), before arriving in the United States in 1967. Her existential art practice is informed by her interests in meditation and nature, exploring what she describes as “the dark source,” the concealed aspects of the world that lie beneath what we perceive on the surface; Rabinovich intends to reveal through her art what is concealed. Her travels to Nepal, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Peru, as well as the New York state’s Hudson River Valley have deeply impacted her work, as has her study of poetry and her practice of Vipassana meditation. In the 2000s she shifted from making paintings to using riverbed sediment and mud as a medium. She has had solo exhibitions at the 10th Bienal Internacional de Cuenca (Ecuador), the Americas Society, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts (both in New York), and was awarded the Lee Krasner Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 2011–12.
This essay, from a catalogue for the exhibition Raquel Rabinovich: Anthology of the Riverbeds curated by Julia P. Herzberg and held at the Fundación Alon para las Artes, Buenos Aires, from October to December 2008, suggests that Rabinovich’s artistic production begins in the darkness of her mind and emerges into the light producing a tangible, though transient, object.. Usually showing her work in and around the New York area, this exhibition represented the artist’s only solo exhibition in her home country at the time since the 1980s.