Project Wall, Seven (2011) was created by Luis Camnitzer. Against a backdrop of casino green felt, eight dice have been rolled to spell out seven. While the number seven has potent cultural and religious symbolism, it is also associated with good fortune in games of chance, including the dice game of craps, in which seven can be the most powerful number.

Camnitzer’s work often investigates systems of language and communication and the relationships between image, object, text and meaning. As a symbol associated with luck, seven may serve as a suggested meditation on the beauty of randomness and chance occurrence and its intersection with odds, probabilities and notions of fate. Camnitzer seems ever interested in engaging spectators in the creative process, enlisting their wit and participation and proposing inquiries, ideas and metaphors for consideration.

Born in Germany in 1937 and raised in Uruguay, Camnitzer moved to New York in 1964 when he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study printmaking in the U.S. During his five-decade career in the U.S. since that move, Camnitzer has become an influential artist, critic, scholar, curator and educator.  His works have been included in important exhibitions in the United States, Latin America and Europe, organized and presented by the Davos Museum, Zurich; El Museo del Barrio, New York; and Dia Foundation, New York, among others, and featured in numerous international biennials, including Havana, Venice, Sao Paulo, Gwangju, Documenta, and the Whitney Museum.

Camnitzer has written or contributed significantly to several books including “New Art of Cuba”; “On Art, Artists, Latin America and Other Utopias”; “Making Art Global, Part 1: The Havana Biennial”; “Face to Face: The Davos Collections”; and “Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation”; as well as essays on political and conceptual art for numerous contemporary art journals. Along with Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss, he was one of the curators for the groundbreaking 1999 exhibition “Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s.”

Hear what Camnitzer has to say in an interview aired on KCUR-FM Radio, Kansas City’s National Public Radio affiliate.