Joana Vasconcelos
Joana Vasconcelos is a Portuguese artist known for her large-scale installations.
Biography
Vasconcelos was born in 1971 in Paris, France. Following the Carnation Revolution in 1974, her family returned home to Portugal from their exile in France. She studied at the Centro de Arte & Comunicação Visual in Lisbon. In 2009 she received the Order of Prince Henry. She lives and works in Lisbon.Works
Vasconcelos exhibited at the 2005 Venice Biennale where she included A Noiva , a 20 ft. high chandelier made of over 14,000 OB Tampons.In 2010, a major solo show of Vasconcelos's work, titled "I Will Survive", was hosted at Haunch of Venison, 6 Burlington Gardens, London.
In June 2011, the installation "Contaminação" opened the group exhibition The World Belongs to You, held at Palazzo Grassi.
In 2012, Vasconcelos showed her work at the major annual contemporary art exhibition in the Palace of Versailles. She was the first woman and the youngest contemporary artist to exhibit in Versailles.
In 2013 the artist represented Portugal in a solo show at the country's pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The work Trafaria Praia was installed in an anchored boat and at the same time a floating art gallery.
In 2018 Vasconcelos presented the retrospective exhibition "I'm Your Mirror" at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, in Spain, having been the only Portuguese artist to accomplish the honor. The exhibition comprised 30 works representing 25 years of her artistic career.
In 2020, Vasconcelos created a massive site-specific work, Valkyrie Mumbet at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. This exhibition was her first solo show in the United States. The work is part of a series of large-scale pieces that the artist creates for specific spaces, in homage to certain inspiring women who are connected with that location. This particular work honors Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman, an enslaved woman whose court battle for her freedom in 1781 helped make slavery illegal in Massachusetts.
In 2024, she exhibited her Valkyrie Mumbet installation and towering Tree Of Life, with its 110,000 hand-stitched fabric leaves at the launching of the newly opened Malta International Contemporary Arts Space.