Pedro Reyes: Ad Usum / To Be Used

Artist Pedro Reyes,  editor José Luis Falconi, and contributor Liz Munsell discuss Ad Usum / To Be Used, a survey of Reyes’s projects. Opening remarks by contributor and Harvard faculty Doris Sommer. The publication is a collection of images, interviews, and critical essays intended as an apparatus for multiplying the possibilities when art becomes a resource for the common good. 

For more than a decade the Mexico City–based artist, architect, and cultural agent Pedro Reyes has been turning existing social problems into opportunities for effecting tangible change through collective imagination. By breaking open failed models and retooling them with space to project alternatives, Reyes’s art enables productive diversions of otherwise destructive forces. Ad Usum: To Be Used is the second volume in the series Focus on Latin American Art and Agency, which is dedicated to contemporary cultural agents, a term that is perhaps best understood through the words of Reyes himself: “changing our individual habits has no degree of effectiveness” as “progress is only significant if you start to multiply by 10, by 100, by 1,000.”

This full-color illustrated survey is published by Harvard University Press, and includes critical essays by José Luis Falconi, Robin Greeley, Johan Hartle, Adam Kleinman, and Doris Sommer, as well as interviews between the artist and such seminal thinkers as Lauren Berlant, Michael Hardt, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Antanas Mockus. The book will be available for sale during the event.