The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Fall Visual Grant to Catalina Schliebener for her series, “Satanic Panic”.

Catalina Schliebener (she/they) is a Sudamerican, Chilean-born visual artist and educator currently based in Brooklyn NY who works primarily with collage, installation, and murals. The subject matter of their work focuses on everyday images and objects related to childhood. Children’s books, pedagogical objects, costumes, sports and games are frequent sources of material in their work. Schliebener is particularly interested in childhood because in this period the limits between reality and fiction are not yet defined. They intentionally works with material that carries implicit narratives around gender, sexuality, race and class. Children’s stories and games are embedded with morals that indirectly teach social and behavioral norms. Schliebener seeks to draw attention to these norms in order to render them uncanny. Their intention with this strategy is to pause or interrupt the narrative, to introduce ambiguity in the face of supposed certainty.

Their work has been exhibited in Bronx Museum of the Arts, (Bronx, NY),  Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York, NY), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Santiago, Chile), Boston Center for the Arts (Boston, MA), Centro Cultural de España (Santiago, Chile), Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Center for Books Arts (New York, NY), Catalyst Arts (Belfast, Northern Ireland), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Brooklyn, NY), Hache Galería (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Galería Jardín Oculto (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Galería Metropolitana (Santiago, Chile), and Bureau of General Services-Queer Division (New York, NY), among others.

A recipient of multiple FONDART Grants (Cultural and Arts Development Fund of the Government of Chile), Schliebener also received grants from DIRAC (Board of Cultural Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Relations of Chile) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (New York, NY). They also received a Queer Artist Fellowship from the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (2017), and an Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) Fellowship from the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2018).

Catalina Schliebener’s Satanic Panic series references the moral panic and collective hysteria that originated in the US in the 1980s, spreading through many parts of the world in the late 1990s, including their home country of Chile. What particularly interests them about this cultural phenomenon is that in many cases those accused of committing crimes were queer individuals or outsiders in some other form, many of whom were also caretakers for children. The collective hysteria surrounding these criminal accusations served as a camp expression of the culture in which we lived. As a queer, brown, South American immigrant living in the US and working in the field of early childhood education, Schliebener is particularly interested in this phenomenon and its connections to the present.

Their Satanic Panic series is comprised of two types of work: large format collages/murals, and installations of juxtaposed objects such as porcelain figurines and articulated plastic characters from different Disney/Pixar movies. The collages combine fragments of Disney books published in the 1990s with portions of pedagogical books created in the 1960s and 70s. Their focus is on how the activities and games outlined in these books replicate the gender, sexuality, race, and class stereotypes of the adult world, and how those interact with the equally regulated fantasy world of Disney. In this series, Schliebener explores the possibility of creating third images that in a subtle way bring all the narratives depicted in the original material into question.

In addition, Schliebener has extensive teaching experience, from early childhood education to undergraduate education, on topics ranging from philosophy and art theory to art instruction in schools, studios, and museum settings. They are currently working as a teaching artist with the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and facilitates gender and sexuality trainings for the Early Childhood Professional Development Institute at the City University of New York (CUNY). They received a Bachelor of Philosophy and a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the Universidad de Arte y Ciencias Sociales (ARCIS; Santiago, Chile).

For more information on Catalina please visit their website and Instagram.