Livia Corona Benjamin wins 2019 Julius Shulman Photography Excellence Award

Along with her videos and paintings, Corona Benjamin's photos explore the relationship between local residents and the buildings they construct, inhabit, and use, highlighting narratives that have been repressed or marginalized. The photos also depict the roles that the government plays in urban and rural planning in Mexico.

“Her projects examine present-day colonial legacies while also challenging the persistent belief in modernism as the ultimate architectural paradigm for the Americas,” the JSI says on Corona Benjamin's work. “In her ongoing photographic and formal experimentation, which moves constantly between representation and abstraction, Corona Benjamin also responds to broader questions about artistic production and to the tension between the industrial and the handmade.”

Based in New York and Mexico City, Corona Benjamin has become one of the most important photographers of her generation, and is also a lecturer and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow for her project “Two Million Homes for Mexico”. Another one of her notable projects includes “Nobody Knows, Nobody Knew”, which delves into the socio-political history of over 4,000 grain silos that were built throughout Mexico’s agrarian communities between the 1960s-90s by the country’s Commission for Food Subsistence. Her works have been exhibited worldwide and are in the permanent collections of institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Portland Museum of Art, the Berezdivin Collection in Puerto Rico, and more.