Emerging Artist

Adela Goldbard (MFA 2017)

by Zoya Brumberg (MA 2015)

Adela Goldbard (MFA 2017), an artist and filmmaker from Mexico City, received the 2017 Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists. She is the final recipient of the Edes prize, a one-year, $30,000 award given to a recent alum from one of four Chicago-area institutions. For almost a decade, this highly competitive award recognized artists’ creative potential and enabled them to substantially advance their practice.

Goldbard’s work draws from the political possibilities of art to enact and engage with social change, weaves the conflicts and uncertainties of history with those of the present, and engages with borderlands, immigration, and Latin American hybrid cultural identities. With the Edes Foundation award, Goldbard plans to further develop her project The Final Judgment, which is the title of a play that was performed in Mexico during the Spanish colonial time, created as a tactic to convert indigenous people to Catholicism.

“I want to talk about the border, and I want to talk about migration through the adaptation of this play. The project will involve the use of a vertical stage and special effects similar to the ones used in medieval times in Europe and in the Spanish colonies in America,” she explains.

Goldbard is excited to finish The Final Judgment and other projects that she began while at SAIC with the help of the Edes prize. “The Final Judgment is a project that has been in my mind for many, many years, and I’m very excited to have the resources to finally make it happen,” she says.

Past recipients of the Edes Foundation prize from SAIC include Nadav Assor (MFA 2010), Meghan Moe Beitiks (MFA 2013), Catherine Pancake (MFA 2012), Sarah Sohn (MFA 2011), Spencer Stucky (MFA 2014), Leonard Suryajaya (MFA 2015), and Norman Teague (MFA 2016).