Agustina Woodgate is an Argentinian artist who lives and works between Amsterdam and Miami.
Early life and education
Woodgate was born in 1981 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. As a child, Woodgate spent weekends illustrating comic books and building experiments with her brother. Woodgate reported being "an avid collector of crap and nonsense things, like the cigarette boxes of different brands, erasers with different shapes, stickers, letter papers, bottle caps, stones, coins." Woodgate states she found developed her style as a teenager. She would illustrate her weekend adventures and gift photocopies to friends. She would then go on to draw her dreams, describing her drawings as "delirious nonsense images." She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Instituto Universito Nacional de Arte, Buenos Aires in 2004. Shortly after, Woodgate moved to Miami, where she gained recognition for clandestinely sewing labels inscribed with poetry into clothing at thrift stores, a project that Woodgate described as "poetry bombing."
Career and exhibitions
Woodgate works in a variety of forms, including radio, public art, and sculpture. Woodgate's solo projects include New Landscapes, Art Positions, Art Basel Miami Beach, Collectivism, Spinello Projects, Miami ; Growing Up, Miami-Dade Public Library ; Endlessly Falling, Dimensions Variable, Miami and Radio Espacio Estacion, an "ongoing online nomadic bilingual radio station." Woodgate's public projects include I. Stanley Levine Memorial Bench, commissioned by the Art in Public Places committee of Miami Beach, Hopscotch, commissioned by the Bass Museum, Miami, Kulturpark, an initiative set in an abandoned amusement park in East Berlin, 1111, Highway Billboards & Bus Shelter Posters, Commissioned by Locust Projects, and Concrete Poetry, a permanent urban design project as a part of the Miami Poetry Festival in collaboration with O, Miami and Miami-Dade County's Department of Transportation and Public Works. Woodgate has been a part of many group exhibitions, including the Denver Art Museum, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin ; White Box, NY ; Gallery Nosco, London ; Good Children Gallery, New Orleans ; Naples Museum of Art, FL ; North Carolina Museum ; Montreal Biennale, Canada and Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Denver Art Museum. Woodgate's work has been commissioned by many institutions, including the Bienal de las Américas, Denver; ArtPort, Tel Aviv; PlayPublik, Poland; DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Washington, DC; The Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Kulturpark, Berlin; Locust Projects, Miami y MassMOCA, Massachusetts; Storefront for Art and Architecture, St.Paul MN; CIFO Foundation, Miami; Love the Everglades Movement; and Florida International University. Woodgate is also the recipient honours and awards including the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship, National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, San Antonio, TX ; Art Matters Grant, NY and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. She was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Denver Art Museum.
Works
Woodgate's approach has been described as "speculative, practical, and site and context-responsive, presenting critical alternatives to concepts on social orders, resource management and information distribution bringing clarity, scale, and accessibility." Some of Woodgate's pieces includeThe Ballroom, Milky Ways, Tower, Sandcastle, Hopscotch, and National Times, which was featured at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Spinello Projects presented Woodgate at ABC Art Berlin Contemporary with The Ballroom, a collection of 50 outdated hand-sanded world globes kept to roll around on the floor. Spinello Projects' webpage reads, "by sanding away the topographical and political markers of the nations of the world down to homogenous land masses, Woodgate implies a kind of cartographic implosion. The Ballroom becomes a representation of an ever changing ecology and a cartography that urges for a new assessment of the land and its use." Milky Ways is a continuation of Woodgate's Skin Rug Collection, in which Woodgate sews handmade rugs using the outer skin layer of discarded stuffed animals. Tower and Sandcastle are a part of Woodgate's I Want to Be a Princess Series, in which Woodgate used human hair to create 3000 bricks for her projects. Tower is approximately four feet tall. The castle's window frame is made of blonde hair, and Woodgate used senior citizens' hair for the white necessary for the ledge above the window. Sandcastle is made to look as if it had been molded from sand using a bucket. Hopscotch is a large sidewalk 'game' piece charted over the South Elm neighbourhood. According to Elsewhere, a museum and artist residency, "Hopscotch is an invitation to the public to imagine new ways to play in the city, to discover new parts of the neighborhood and to occupy public space. As a drawing that unfolds in real space, it also functions as a political map that inscribes the contours of the neighborhood." National Times was featured in the Whitney Biennial 2019. National Times is a display of 40 clocks, spanning all three walls of the room, interconnected by a network of tubing, and synchronized by one master system. National Times’ synchronization is attributed to the closed-circuit network set up in a “‘master/slave’ configuration.” The system is controlled and kept in order by an individual “digital master clock sends power signals to a series of analog slave clocks, commanding synchronized measure across an entire institution.” This frequency of time is synchronized to “the atomic clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which establishes official United States time.” Woodgate had also slipped sandpaper around each hand, so that as the hand make rotations around the face of the clock, the numerals are gradually etched away. The Whitney Biennial website reads, “Conditioned by the current state of labor and power, the slave clocks progressively erode their functional value, collectively reclaiming autonomy in the process of disintegration."
Whitney Biennial 2019
Woodgate was on the official artist list for the Whitney Biennial 2019. However, she was later one of the eight artists who asked the Whitney Museum of American Art to remove their works from the Biennial, "citing what they describe as the museum’s lack of response to calls for the resignation of a board member with ties to the sale of military supplies, including tear gas." Woodgate and fellow artist Eddie Arroyo announced through Spinello Projects that “the request is intended as condemnation of Warren Kanders’ continued presence as Vice Chair of the Board and the Museum's continued failure to respond in any meaningful way to growing pressure from artists and activists.” Her work National Times remained available for viewing during the Whitney Biennial 2019.
