NEW YORK.- The Public Art Fund presents the exhibit Diana Guerrero-Maciá: The Beautiful Game in Black and White through September 9, 2007. The World is Round features new commissions and recent works by Diana Guerrero-Maciá, who has created works that explore collective consciousness and expression. Chicago-based artist Diana Guerrero-Maciá's sculpture, The Beautiful Game in Black and White, explores the ways in which soccer has become a universal language understood and "spoken" by billions of people around the world. The work depicts a flattened and scaled up soccer ball, rendered in vinyl on aluminum. Crossing political, religious, economic and geographical boundaries, soccer is perhaps the world's most "common" pastime. (It is estimated that one in five people on the planet watched some part of the recent World Cup.) In addition to being culturally ubiquitous, the soccer ball is mathematically precise: its 32 facets form a truncated icosahedron, which is an Archimedean solid. Flattened into two dimensions, the form has similarities to a world map, and can be read as a metaphor for the global reach of sports and popular culture.

Guerrero-Maciá is best known for her hand-sewn text-based pieces, and the appropriation of familiar and found objects. In keeping with her interest in language, The Beautiful Game in Black and White contains an element of word play: where the soccer ball manufacturer's logo would be, she transforms the name 'Mitre' (a popular European brand) so it reads "Mirth," meaning joy or amusement. She also appliquès "32" onto the work's surface, as a player's number would be stitched onto a jersey, noting the coincidence between soccer ball geometry and the number of teams that advance to the World Cup finals.

Born in Cleveland in 1966, Guerrero-Maciá received a BFA from Villanova University (1988) and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art (1992). She has exhibited her work in numerous solo exhibitions including Words Make Wide Open Spaces, Bodybuilder and Sportsman Gallery, Chicago (2006); Artpace, San Antonio (2005); My First Painting, Twenty-One Years Later, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2003); and Perfect Lovers, Museum of Contemporary Art, St. Louis (2000).