María Fernanda Cardoso (born 1963) is a Colombian artist based in Australia. Her contemporary art references many types of ready-made material, including plastic, trash, plants, dried and living animals, bones and

styrofoam Styrofoam is a brand of closed-cell extruded polystyrene foam (XPS), manufactured to provide continuous building insulation board used in walls, roofs, and foundations as thermal insulation and as a water barrier. This material is light blue in ...

. One of her most famous

art installation Installation art is an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often cal ...

s was a

flea circus A flea circus is a circus sideshow attraction in which fleas are attached (or appear to be attached) to miniature carts and other items, and encouraged to perform circus acts within a small housing. History The first records of flea perfor ...

that featured live

cat flea The cat flea (scientific name ''Ctenocephalides felis'') is an extremely common parasitic insect whose principal host is the cat, domestic cat, although a high proportion of the fleas found on dogs also belong to this species. This is despite the ...

s. The circus toured internationally at venues including the Sydney Opera House, the Centre Pompidou, the Arts Festival Atlanta, the Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia), and the San Francisco Exploratorium. This work, including a series of videos made in collaboration with Ross Rudesch Harley, is now part of Tate Modern's permanent collection. Her works have been featured in several museums internationally in Europe, the Americas, and Australia, and have won several awards. She resides in

Sydney Sydney is the capital city of the States and territories of Australia, state of New South Wales and the List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city in Australia. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Syd ...

Biography

In the early 1980s, Cardoso studied architecture and the visual arts at the University of the Andes in Bogotá. In 1990, she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture and Installation at Yale University. Cardoso moved to Sydney, Australia, in 1997. In 2000, the Museum of Modern Art in New York commissioned her to create a major installation for their millennium show, "Modern Starts". Here she installed 36,000 plastic lilies in a 125-foot long wall, which subsequently toured museums throughout the United States. In 2003, she represented Colombia at the Venice Biennale, exhibiting a large installation of starfish woven together into a submarine landscape called "Woven Water". She had a solo exhibition in 2011 at Melbourne's Arc One gallery centered on the genitalia of male insects entitled "It's not size that matters, it is shape". The following year, she created "The Museum of Copulatory Organs" for her doctoral project. She was awarded her PhD from the

University of Sydney The University of Sydney (USYD) is a public university, public research university in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in both Australia and Oceania. One of Australia's six sandstone universities, it was one of the ...

linked to the

Sydney College of the Arts The Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) is a contemporary art school that was a faculty of the University of Sydney from 1990 until 2017, when it became a school of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Until the end of 2019, the campus was locat ...

in 2012. Her mother is the architect and her sister is the director

Patricia Cardoso Patricia Cardoso is a Colombian and American filmmaker. She is best known for her 2002 film ''Real Women Have Curves'', which centers around the experiences of a young Mexican-American woman navigating the challenges of family, culture, and bod ...

Cardoso Flea Circus

Cardoso created a flea circus that included the following "performers" and "stuntfleas": Harry Fleadini, an escape artist; Samson and Delilah, fleas that lifted cotton ball weights; Teeny and Tiny, tightrope walkers; Pipita and Pepon, a flea couple who pushed luminescent balls on a wire; and Brutus, who pulled a locomotive. Cardoso guided the behavior of the fleas by reward; when they behaved as desired, she let them feed directly on her blood. As Cardoso explained, "It's one of the hardest thing in life to train fleas, it took six years and it requires a lot of patience, no one knew how to train fleas anymore". The first public

performance A performance is an act or process of staging or presenting a play, concert, or other form of entertainment. It is also defined as the action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function. Performance has evolved glo ...

of the Cardoso Flea Circus took place in October 1996 at San Francisco's

Exploratorium The Exploratorium is a museum of science museum, science, technology museum, technology, and art museum, arts in San Francisco, California. Founded by physicist and educator Frank Oppenheimer in 1969, the museum was originally located in the ...

. Because of the size of the fleas, she collaborated with Ross Rudesch Harley to add audio and video for a larger projection. It was recently acquired by the

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international Modern art, modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Live ...

Other works

"Cementerio—Vertical Garden" is a series of unique installation pieces made of artificial flowers placed as if growing horizontally from the wall over funerary stones outlined in pencil. The pieces, made with a group of plastic flowers and pencil, were exhibited and developed by the artist from 1990 to 1999. These kinds of installation are currently in the most important art collections worldwide such as

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...

(MoMA) in New York,

Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) is a privately held Latin American art organization based in Venezuela and New York City founded by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and Gustavo Cisneros. History In the 1970s, during Patricia Phelps d ...

in Caracas, Colección Diane and Bruce Halle in Arizona, Colección D.O.P. in Madrid, Perez Art Museum in Miami,

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern art, modern and contemporary art museum and nonprofit organization located in San Francisco, California. SFMOMA was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art ...

, California, among others. "Dancing Frogs" is an assembly of dried dead frogs connected by a circular wire. The frogs appear to be spinning in circles as if in a ritual dance. The piece explicitly references the representations and indigenous symbols of the

Muisca The Muisca (also called the Chibcha) are indigenous peoples in Colombia and were a Pre-Columbian culture of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense that formed the Muisca Confederation before the Spanish colonization of the Americas. The Muisca spe ...

, as the circle and the frogs were part of this Pre-Hispanic symbolism.

References

External links

*
18th Biennale of Sydney, Expert of Flea Circus

The Wonderful World of Professor Cardoso (2012)

Interview – Maria Fernanda Cardoso

Shearing Sheep: the Process

Cardoso Flea Circus Live in Paris
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cardoso, Maria Fernanda 1963 births Living people 20th-century Colombian women artists 21st-century Colombian women artists Colombian emigrants to Australia 21st-century Colombian sculptors

Biography

Cardoso Flea Circus

Other works

References

Further reading

External links