Harold Mendez is a first-generation American of Colombian and Mexican descent. His work considers cultural memory, ritual, and the transnational experience; pointing to how constructions of history and geography shape our sense of self. Working between photography and sculpture across the Americas, Mendez explores constellatory narratives about the body and the nuanced tensions between fiction and truth, visibility and absence. Recent projects engage with an array of evocative materials in order to poetically address the body's agency, while continually making a case for the articulation of these complex narratives and their conditions. Mendez's ten-year career survey Let us gather in a flourishing way premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2020 and is touring museums in 2021 including the Institute for Contemporary Art, Virginia Commonwealth. He has participated in significant exhibitions, including Being: New Photography 2018, at the Museum of Modern Art, and the 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York. Mendez's work has been the subject of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem; LAXART, Los Angeles; MoMA PS1, New York; the Renaissance Society, Chicago; Project Row Houses, Houston; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among other venues. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Headlands Center for the Arts; Light Work as well as the Kohler Arts/ Industry. Mendez's first institutional monograph The years now, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2021. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
