Today we’d like to introduce you to Teréz Iacovino.
Hi Teréz, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I am a Capricorn Sun, Virgo Rising, Scorpio Moon, who was raised by strong women in the woods of upstate New York. Growing up in a multigenerational household with my mother and grandmother, I learned the importance of caring for one another and working cooperatively from a young age. My mother, a nurse by night who longed to spend her days in the library, always encouraged me to do what I loved. What I grew to love was art—making it, experiencing it, talking about it, caring for it. This would eventually lead me to move to Minnesota to pursue an MFA in studio art. I have lived and worked in Minneapolis now for the past fourteen years.
While my work as a curator and educator has taken the helm in my practice over the last five years, I still continue to make art both independently and collectively. Since 2012 I have worked with Crescent Collective, founded by me, artist Laura Bigger, and architectect Artemis Ettsen. Together we investigate the ways in which humans interface with plants, technology, and environment through a variety of sculptural installations and public art interventions. In addition, as the Assistant Curator of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, housed within the University of Minnesota’s Department of Art, I work with a small, close knit team that includes undergraduate and graduate students. We center learning by doing and embrace an apprenticeship model. Back in 2012, I was one of those very graduate students working in the gallery and that experience opened a door to curatorial practice that I otherwise would never have stepped through.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
They say anything worth doing isn’t easy, and every year comes with new challenges. As a working parent, I constantly have to assess what I have the capacity for in my work and home life. This means acknowledging that I have to be far more strategic with what I want and not what someone else wants for me. Over the last five years this has meant cultivating my relationship to my Puertoricaness and allowing myself to claim it. As someone who didn’t grow up with their Puerto Rican family, the culture, or the language, the birth of my son five years ago made me more deeply consider what I wanted to pass onto him. Culture is the stories we tell ourselves and I needed to search out the stories that had been lost to me for so long.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
My three fold practice as an artist, curator, and educator has made it my mission to cultivate empathy for, give voice to, and work with underrepresented artists. I feel that empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, is crucial to building strong relationships. It drives the work I do as and the stories I want to help tell.
This also led me to embark on a major curatorial project that I am currently working on entitled Vaivén: 21st Century Art of Puerto Rico and Its Diaspora. This exhibition gathers forty-three intergenerational artists, working from Puerto Rico and across its US-based diaspora. Artists in the exhibition work across a range of approaches to image- and mark-making, sculpture and installation, and sound and video. To be of Puerto Rican descent is to be inextricably linked with diaspora and Black and Caribbean epistemologies. In response, artists in the exhibition explore central themes of memory, language, place, and ancestral knowledge. After five years of research, fundraising, and planning, with my co-curator, José López Serra, we will celebrate the exhibition opening this coming September 13th of 2025. We hope to see you there!
Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
Connecting with artists and learning about their lives, their passions, and their challenges brings me so much joy. It reminds me that we’re all in this together and how vital it is to take the time to learn each other’s stories.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://tereziacovino.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tereztheroof/
Image Credits
01 Photo: Teréz Iacovino, Courtesy of the artist.
02 Photo: Crescent Collective, Courtesy of the artists.
03 Photo: Crescent Collective, Courtesy of the artists.
04 Photo: Easton M. Green, Courtesy of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery.
05 Photo: Easton M. Green, Courtesy of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery.
06 Photo: Easton M. Green, Courtesy of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery.
