Roberto Visani @ The Art Bodega

Roberto Visani

Via MARCARSON September 20, 2025

The Art Bodega hosted a powerful presentation and hands-on workshop with artist Roberto Visani, centered on his Cardboard Slave Kit series.

Visani introduced the audience to his practice of transforming historic depictions of the enslaved into digitized, flat-pack sculptural kits. He walked participants through the conceptual strategies behind the work; how archival images and nineteenth-century sculptures, such as Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved?, were researched, 3D-modeled, and translated into laser-cut cardboard forms that invite viewers to become makers.

Sculpture by Roberto Visani

Attendees then joined Visani in assembling Carpeaux Blend, a cardboard recreation of the Carpeaux's Why Born Enslaved? Materials and tools were provided, allowing each participant to experience firsthand the meticulous folding and building that animates the artist’s critique of history, technology, and representation.

The evening underscored Visani’s larger inquiry into how art can confront the legacies of slavery while transforming passive spectators into active collaborators, a fitting dialogue for The Art Bodega’s mission to merge community engagement with contemporary practice.

Roberto Visani

Roberto Visani Bio: 

Roberto Visani is a multi-media artist residing  in Brooklyn, New York. He has exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Bronx Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Barbican Galleries. Visani has been awarded residencies from Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Chelsea College of Art and Abrons Art Center. He is a NYFA Fellow in Sculpture and was a Fulbright Fellow to Ghana.  His work has been reviewed by the New York Times, Art Forum, Art News, and Frieze among others.  Since 2004 he has taught at John Jay College of Criminal Justice where he is an associate professor of art.  

Visani's sculptures reference the African diaspora and transatlantic artifacts and archives as a form of comparative history. Within the body of work titled Primary Structures, the artist reconsiders stylized indigenous representations of the human form, specifically West African figurative sculpture and its relationship to modernism and 3D modeling. Through a combination of analog and digital methods, these works re-orient misplaced ideas of primitivism through a metamorphosis, translating code into cardboard and cast metal and adding layers of meaning throughout the process. The sculptures, cast in iron, bronze, and aluminum, suggest an enduring legacy of cultural expression while employing digital fabrication as a generative tool. This juxtaposition of traditional and technology explores the anonymity that our digital world engenders and how identity interfaces with it.