Monika Bravo

Monika Bravo (born 1964) is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Bogotá, Colombia, who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been internationally exhibited, including at Stenersen Museum in Oslo; Seoul's International Biennial of New Media Art; Bank of the Republic in Bogotá; New Museum and El Museo del Barrio in New York City. Her work has received acclaim including a 1999 New York Times review who called her piece Synchronicity (from a group exhibition at El Museo del Barrio) a "standout...small, beautifully blurry video images of boats plowing through New York Harbor..."

In 1982, Bravo left Bogotá, moving to Rome to study fashion design, which she continued in Paris at Esmod, before traveling to London to study photography. In 1994 she moved to New York where she is currently still based.

Career

Among Bravo's most well-known artworks is September 10, 2001, Uno Nunca Muere La Vispera dedicated to artist Michael Richards who died in Tower One on the morning of the September 11 attacks. In summer 2001 Bravo was an artist-in-residence in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's World Views program. As described in a 2006 book:

On September 10, she spent more than six hours making time-lapse exposures of the boats below, the bridges, and an advancing storm that sent lightning through the night sky, illuminated Tower Two. Around midnight, Bravo gathered her tapes and bid Richards "Good night" as he watched the end of the Giants-Broncos game on Monday Night Football; he had chosen to remain there through morning. Her footage, shown in small venues and on the Internet, would be the last previous glimpse of how those who lived and worked and dreamed in the towers had regarded the city below them.

In 2010, Bravo was one of four winning artists in New York City's "urbancanvas" design competition with her work "BREATHING_WALL_UC".

Public art

• "Breathing_Wall_UC", City Point, Brooklyn Installation

Selected exhibitions

• "Urumu" (February 1 - March 29, 2014), NC-arte, Bogotá, Colombia
• "Monika Bravo: New Work" (September 22, 2013 – May 4, 2014), Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey, United States
• "Monika Bravo: Landscape(s) of Belief" (September 6, 2013 – March 15, 2014), Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, Utah, United States
• "VIRAL" (October 3, 2013 – February 2, 2014), Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, D.C., United States
• "The Storytellers: Narratives in International Contemporary Art" (August 30 - November 4, 2012), Stenersen Museum, Oslo, Norway
• "Paladar in Third Streaming" (October 24, 2012), Third Streaming, New York City, New York, United States
• "Tracing the Unseen Border" (April 21 - May 22, 2011), La Mama La Galleria, New York City, New York, United States
• "'Tawkin' New Yawk City Walls" (2005), Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, Washington, D.C., United States
• "Frequency + Repetition" (January 13 - February 26, 2005), Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York City, New York, United States
• "Playing with Time" (September 28, 2002 – January 25, 2003), SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States
• "A_Maze" (April 26 - May 25, 2002), De Chiara Gallery, New York City, New York, United States
• "World Views: Open Studio Exhibition" (December 1, 2001 – January 13, 2002), New Museum, New York City, New York, United States
• "The S-Files" (1999), El Museo del Barrio, New York City, New York, United States

Publications

• Monika Bravo, Gabriel Cure, Juan Luque (ed.), Gabriel Cure Lemaitre La Arquitectura del Detalle, Two Leaves Editions 2012
• Ricardo Cisneros, Between Two Worlds, Two Leaves Editions 2011 (Design by Monika Bravo)
• Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, Naomi Ben-Shahar, Monika Bravo, Patty Chang, Site Matters: The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's World Trade Center Artist Residency 1997–2001, LMCC 2004