Harold Mendez

A first-generation American, born in Chicago to Colombian and Mexican parents, Harold Mendez works with installation, photography, sculpture, and text to reference reconstructions of place and identity. His work addresses the relationships between transnational citizenship, memory, and possibility, considering how history is not only an affirmed past but a potential future. His recent work examines how reclaimed objects, makeshift monuments, and images reveal a life parallel to conflict, demonstrating both factual evidence and where traces of fiction emerge.

Selected exhibitions of Mendez’s work include the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Renaissance Society; Museum of Modern Art / PS1, New York; Studio Museum, Harlem; Drawing Center, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. Reviews of his work have appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, and Frieze.