The 20 Most Influential Young Curators in Latin America

Key search The Most Influential Curators of 2017

By Silas Martí
Oct 20, 2017 6:49 pm
In recent years, a spotlight has been trained on the art
communities of Latin American countries, with the Western
world increasingly looking south (reflected in major solo shows
for artists like Joaquín Torres-Garcíaand Carmen Herrera at
New York institutions, as well as an ever-increasing interest in
Cuban and Caribbean artists). Meanwhile, curators like Jochen
Volz and Pablo León de la Barra are bringing greater global
attention to the historical and contemporary practices of artists
across Central and South America.
In a territory where borders are not as porous as they may seem,
and where the power dynamics still hinge on the interest and
approval of big art world centers, a new generation of Latin
American curators has made strides in shedding light on artists
from diverse regions. They have placed a curatorial lens over
the fraught political histories and experimental cultures common
to their countries.
Here, we gather together 20 individuals who are making an
impact. These Latin American curators are amplifying the
voices of local artists, engaging in cultural dialogue with other
parts of the world, and often taking a revisionist approach—
filtering the past through the present in order to shape the future.

Marina Reyes Franco

Independent Curator in San Juan, Puerto Rico and Co-founder of La
Ene in Buenos Aires
Recent career highlight: “Watch your step / Mind your head” at Institut
für Auslandsbeziehunge (ifa) Galerie in Berlin
Portrait of Marina Reyes Franco. Photo by Victoria Tomaschko. Courtesy of Marina Reyes
Franco.

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Marina Reyes Franco traveled

south to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to study and establish her
career, before returning to Puerto Rico years later to continue
her work from her native country. In 2010, she co-founded
(along with artist and curator Gala Berger) La Ene, or Nuevo
Museo Energía de Arte Contemporáneo, an alternative space in
the Argentine capital, and the city’s first contemporary art
museum.
“Living in Buenos Aires was very formative for me in terms of
political education, civil involvement, and feminist thinking,”
says Reyes Franco. “And La Ene continues to be one of my
proudest achievements. The museum-as-project idea was very
important in the Argentine scene at a time when museums were
going through a crisis and we sought to bridge the gap between
the institutional and the independent.” She also co-founded
Proyecto CARA with Lino Divas to map artist-run spaces and
collectives all over Argentina.
Now based in Puerto Rico, she is concerned with addressing
“the economic and social challenges that the country faces as a
U.S. colony, and a Caribbean nation with service and tourism
industries on the rise”—as well as researching the country’s
unwritten and oral histories, as interpreted through visual and
sound art forms, and exploring the constructed ideas about
paradise in the tropics.

Miguel A. López
Chief Curator at Teorética and Lado V, San José, Costa Rica
Recent career highlight: “Balance and Collapse. Patricia Belli: Works
1986-2016,” Teorética, San José
Portrait of Miguel A López. Photo by Daniela Morales L. Courtesy of Miguel A López.

Born in Lima, Peru, where he co-founded the experimental art

space Bisagra with Florencia Portocarrero, Miguel A. López
later moved to Costa Rica and captured the attention of the
country’s art scene by applying a queer, revisionist lens to
exhibition-making. Now the chief curator of San José’s
contemporary art space Teorética, López practices an approach
to contemporary art that’s anchored in the history of 1960s
conceptual movements in Latin America. It’s a period that he
has also examined through the international research platform
he co-founded, Red Conceptualismos del Sur. López has
worked with curators like Ana Longoni, Emilio Tarazona, and
Agustín Perez Rubio—some of the leading voices across Latin
America. Franklin Sirmans, director of the Pérez Museum in
Miami, chose López from a pool of 12 finalists for
the Independent Curators International’s (ICI) Independent
Vision Curatorial Award in 2016, calling him “an important
young voice whose past projects suggest a brilliant future.”

Fernanda Lopes
Curatorial Assistant at Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Recent career highlight: “In Memoriam,” Caixa Cultural, Rio de Janeiro
Portrait of Fernanda Lopes. Photo by Rafael Adorján. Courtesy of Fernanda Lopes.

Fernanda Lopes has established a reputation for investigating

the ways in which important movements of the past shape the
work of a younger generation of artists in Brazil. One of her
most significant bodies of work is her research on the “Grupo
Rex” artists of the 1960s. This short-lived movement was
championed by irreverent heavyweights like Nelson Leirnerand
modernists like Geraldo de Barros and Waldemar Cordeiro—
names also at the forefront of geometric abstraction in São
Paulo. They questioned the pillars of the then-burgeoning art
market in Brazil by allowing the public to take works home
from galleries on an exhibition’s opening day, thereby
subverting the idea of art for sale.
“What I find most interesting are less historical ways of
thinking, free from the official genealogy already built around
Latin American art,” says Lopes. “Ways of thinking that look at
the ‘gaps’ or are at odds with history—it’s what I believe can be
thought of as freedom.”

Júlia Rebouças
Independent Curator, São Paulo and Minas Gerais, Brazil
Recent career highlight: Co-curated the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo,
São Paulo
Portrait of Júlia Rebouças. Courtesy of Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

It was no surprise that the last edition of the Bienal de São

Paulo, directed by Jochen Volz with Júlia Rebouças as one of
his assistant curators, focused on the environment. Much of the
framework seems to have taken shape while both Volz and
Rebouças worked at the Instituto Inhotim, Brazil’s sprawling
contemporary art museum within a botanical garden in Minas
Gerais. In São Paulo, they channeled global discourse about
climate change and the need for renewable sources of energy.
But Rebouças is also very engaged with ideas of transformation
in the artistic sphere. “We young curators and researchers from
Latin America must establish new poetical and political values,”
she says. “It is our role to create a tension with the structure
provided by the market, which has a potential to anesthetize a
scene.”

Sandino Scheidegger
Co-founder of the Random Institute in Zurich, Switzerland and Head of
the Curatorial Program at Despacio in San José, Costa Rica
Recent career highlight: “First Day of Good Weather - Latin American
Art,” organized by Despacio, presented at Sies + Höke in Dusseldorf,
Germany
Portrait of Sandino Scheidegger. Photo by Maripaz Howell. Courtesy of Sandino Scheidegger.

Sandino Scheidegger advocates for what he calls “slow

curating.” In addition to running the influential, hybrid art
space Random Institute in Zürich, alongside Luca Müller—
where the pair’s main strategy is to counter the fast-paced
rhythm of the art world—he also works regularly in Costa Rica,
at San José’s Despacio, which is named after the Spanish word
for “slow.” There, Scheidegger has implemented a program
along the same unconventional lines, converting the space into a
karaoke bar and homebase for lengthy performance festivals.
Since its inception, it has become a driving force in the
development of the artistic scene in Costa Rica and across
Central America.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

Co-founder of Beta-Local, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Recent career highlight: “Sessions,” a series of experimental seminars

San Juan-based artist and curator Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is one

of the most influential figures in Puerto Rico’s art scene. She is
a co-founder of Beta-Local, a San Juan-based arts organization
that is heading up a major arts grant relief fund in the wake of
the devastating Hurricane Maria, which has become something
of a think tank and meeting ground for artists working in all
mediums. She is also director of “Sessions,” a series of seminars
where cultural figures come together to discuss the island’s
political conditions as well as work by emerging artists, and
frequently works abroad—both elsewhere in Latin America and
further afield. Recent artistic projects have taken her to Sala de
Arte Público Siqueiros, in Mexico City, New
York’s Guggenheim Museum, Gasworks, in London, and the
Bienal do Mercosul, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In her artwork,
which often mixes elements of cinema and performance, she has
explored Puerto Rico’s colonial histories.
Alejandra Sarria Molano
Curator at Espacio Odeón and CAMPO, Bogotá, Colombia
Recent career highlight: “A Seat at the Table” at Espacio Odeón,
Bogotá
Portrait of Alejandra Sarria Molano. Courtesy of Alejandra Sarria Molano.

As curator at Espacio Odeón, a performing arts theater in

Bogotá, and co-founder of CAMPO, an interdisciplinary cultural
venue where artist studios share space with galleries, Sarria
Molano often stages projects and exhibitions that address
systems of power or shed light on the way the built environment
reflects the city’s history of conflict. For one such show at
CAMPO, “Marco de lo Común,” Sarria Molano invited artists to
perform interventions in apartment building lobbies and
hallways in order to examine the social tensions that play out
between people in shared spaces. More recently, she has turned
her curatorial eye to issues of land rights and labor conditions as
they relate to food production in “A Seat at the Table,” which
included work by Latin American artists like Maria
Buenaventura and Juliana Sánchez (her co-founder at CAMPO),
as well as Western artists like Christian Jankowski and Martha
Rosler.

Chris Sharp
Independent Curator and Co-founder of Lulu, Mexico City, Mexico
Recent career highlight: Curated the U-TURN Project Rooms section
of ArteBA, Buenos Aires
Portrait of Chris Sharp. Courtesy of Chris Sharp.

American curator Chris Sharp fell in love with Mexico City

when he moved there and co-founded the independent art
space Lulu, alongside Martin Soto Clement, four years ago,
adding to the city’s rich network of alternative and artist-run
venues. Sharp sees his work at Lulu as subverting dominant
modes of artistic production in Latin America. “Where the
status quo revolves around socio-politically engaged
conceptualism,” he says, “Lulu seeks to present an alternative,
in the form of idiosyncratic practices which think plastically, i.e.
through materials. In other words, Lulu is much more interested
in form and materials than language and ideology.”
Sharp has worked with emerging and more established Mexican
artists, including Aliza Nisenbaum and Rodrigo Hernández, in
some cases taking their work to other parts of the world, from
the Mexican capital to Austria. He is currently working on a
show about Mexico City for the Australian Center for
Contemporary Art in Melbourne, which opens in April 2018.

Bernardo Mosqueira
Curator at Solar dos Abacaxis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Recent career highlight: “O Que Vem com a Aurora” at Casa
Triângulo, São Paulo
Portrait of Bernardo Mosqueria. Photo by João Pacca. Courtesy of Bernardo Mosqueria.

One of the most active young curators in the Brazilian art scene,
Bernardo Mosqueira is known for his close work with artists,
and has staged memorable solo shows that have been
responsible for establishing the reputations of up-and-coming
artists like Ivan Grilo and mid-career figures like Afonso Tostes.
And through his work with artists like Grilo and Tostes—who
investigate racial injustices and stereotypes through key
moments in the country’s history of avant-garde art—Mosqueira
revises preconceptions about modernism and racial relations in
Brazil. “I’m attracted to projects engaged in the transformation
of a social context,” he says, “projects not just dressed up to
look marginal, tropical, or experimental.”

Bernardo José de Souza

Curator at Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, Brazil
Recent career highlight: “Depois do Fim” at Fundação Iberê Camargo,
Porto Alegre
Portrait of Bernardo José de Souza. Courtesy of Bernardo José de Souza.

Working inside the sci-fi-like, white concrete shell that is the

Fundação Iberê Camargo—a museum designed by Portuguese
“starchitect” Álvaro Siza in the southern Brazilian city of Porto
Alegre—Bernardo José de Souza uses his curatorial work to
reflect on what he calls “the ruins of modernity on this side of
the Atlantic.” With a background in communications and
photography, de Souza is interested in disrupting traditional
institutional models and building critique around the lack of
cultural engagement that plagued the Brazilian art scene during
the country’s boom years. “Brazil had succumbed to the
seduction of occupying a place on the global stage,” says de
Souza. “If it hadn’t been for the collapse of the country as we
knew it, people would still be sitting comfortably in that VIP
lounge without reacting. I still fight against how little
experimentation there is, how little transgression there is.”

Germano Dushá
Independent Curator and Co-founder of Coletor and Observatório,
São Paulo, Brazil
Recent career highlight: “Vertigem, Gagueira, Repetição” on the
Minhocão, São Paulo
Portrait of Germano Dushá. Courtesy of Germano Dushá.

Germano Dushá is interested in taking art out of museum spaces

and into the public realm. He has staged shows in public squares
and on São Paulo’s Minhocão, the infamous elevated highway
that snakes through the city’s old center. Known for his
influential writings on contemporary art, Dushá is beginning to
build a reputation for himself as one of the boldest young
curators in the Brazilian art scene, with projects that tackle some
of the country’s pressing issues, such as the experiences of
alienation and political apathy. He aims to give a platform to
“those who wish to experiment with new ways of living,
thinking, and operating, those who wish to keep transformation
alive in the heart of things, who are not afraid of change and
work towards making discussions more accessible and
inclusive.”

Natalia Valencia Arango

Independent Curator, Mexico City, Mexico
Recent career highlight: Curated “Los multinaturalistas” (“The Multi-
Naturalists”) at MAMM
Born in Bogotá, Colombia, based in Mexico City, and having
staged projects in Guatemala, as well as Bogotá and Medellín
(and curated an exhibition at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo), Natalia
Valencia embodies the idea that the ties among Latin American
countries run much deeper than just the fact of their shared
colonial histories. She has curated projects at the Museo Quinta
de Bolívar, in Bogotá, and worked as an adviser to the Museo de
la Plata in Taxco, Mexico, in addition to working at Sala de Arte
Público Siqueiros in Mexico City, and participating in the
curatorial program at the Gwangju Biennale in Korea in 2012.
Her international presence and deep knowledge of the local
scene have made her one of the most promising names in the
up-and-coming circuit of Latin American curators.
Clarissa Diniz
Curator at Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Recent career highlight: “Dja Guata Porã” at the Museu de Arte do
Rio, Rio de Janeiro
Portrait of Clarissa Diniz. Courtesy of Clarissa Diniz.

Since the beginning of her career, Clarissa Diniz has been

expanding what it means to be a curator. In her position at the
helm of Rio de Janeiro’s Museu de Arte do Rio, she has
challenged the idea of the curator as an autonomous creative
force by involving artists deeply in the production of
exhibitions. Such was the case with “Dja Guata Porã,” a major
survey of indigenous art and objects that addressed the
conditions of Rio’s native populations. The exhibition was
guest-curated by individuals representing these communities.
“I’m interested in non-hegemonic histories, the revision of
historiographies,” says Diniz. “I’m happy to see young curators
not only dealing with artists of their generation, but also willing
to revise other historical periods and contexts.”

Ana Maria Maia

Professor, Researcher, and Independent Curator, São Paulo, Brazil
Recent career highlight: Her book Vehicle-art: Interventions in the
Brazilian Mass Media (2015)
Portrait of Ana Maria Maia. Courtesy of Ana Maria Maia.

Maria Maia worked as assistant to Agnaldo Farias and Moacir

dos Anjos, mainstays of the Brazilian art scene who
spearheaded the 29th iteration of the Bienal de São Paulo seven
years ago. Since then, she has expanded her influence in
Brazil’s biggest art circuit by presenting the work of some of the
strongest artists of her native Recife, working with established
figures like Paulo Bruscky and Montez Magno, as well as up-
and-coming artists such as Amanda Melo. She also worked
alongside Lisette Lagnado for the Museu de Arte Moderna de
São Paulo’s 33rd Panorama of Brazilian art, which invited
artists to reinvent the Lina Bo Bardi-designed museum space;
it’s considered one of the most radical editions of this biennial
show to date. More recently, she has been teaching art history
and researching. And, in 2015, she published Vehicle-Art:
Interventions in the Brazilian Mass Media, a book about
historical art interventions in Brazilian mass media.

Javier Villa
Senior Curator at Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Buenos
Aires, Argentina
Recent career highlight: “La Paradoja en el Centro” at Museo de Arte
Moderno de Buenos Aires
Portrait of Javier Villa. Courtesy of Javier Villa.

Javier Villa recently shed light on a radical moment in Latin

American art history. “La Paradoja en el Centro,” one of the
most remarkable shows in the recent history of the Museo de
Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (MAMBA), located in the
Argentine capital, explored the 1960s in Buenos Aires, when
artists were engaged in abstraction, performance,
and happenings. It included internationally renowned names
like Lucio Fontana and Marta Minujín, as well as those that are
less widely known, like Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos and
Carmelo Arden Quin. Javier Villa is interested in how political
repression led to an heightened awareness of materials, as well
as shaping an intensely experimental ethos across a generation
of artists.

Florencia Portocarrero
Public Program Curator at Proyecto AMIL and Co-founder and Co-
director of Bisagra, Lima, Peru
Recent career highlight: “Elena Tejada-Herrera, Videos de Esta Mujer:
Registros de Performances 1997-2010” at Proyecto AMIL, Lima
Portrait of Florencia Portocarrero. Couresty of Florencia Portocarrero.

At Lima’s Proyecto AMIL and Bisagra, the latter one of the few
independent art spaces in Lima, Florencia Portocarrero has
cultivated a climate for experimental art in Lima, recently
giving a platform to the work of the subversive Peruvian
performance artist Elena Tejada-Herrera. Her curatorial work,
which sometimes examines relationships and emotional states
(such as her 2012 exhibition at Lima’s Spanish Cultural Center,
“The Tyranny of Intimacy”), is informed by her diverse
professional background. She began with a clinical psychology
degree at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima
before continuing to De Appel arts centre’s curatorial program
in Amsterdam, and then on to the Contemporary Art Theory
MA program at Goldsmiths in London, among other twists and
turns. Portocarrero also worked as a research assistant for the
Emergency Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.

Fernanda Brenner
Artistic Director of Pivô, São Paulo, Brazil
Recent career highlight: “Boom,” a solo show of work by Alexandre da
Cunha at Pivô
Portrait of Fernanda Brenner. Courtesy of Fernanda Brenner.

When she took over two abandoned floors of Oscar Niemeyer’s

monumental Copan building in downtown São Paulo five years
ago to launch Pivô, the most influential space in the city’s
independent art scene, Fernanda Brenner was already on to
something. She knew a change in perspective would come from
a geographical shift toward the heart of Brazil’s concrete
jungle—then still a no-go zone for most local art patrons. Since
then, Pivô has hosted over 40 exhibitions and featured some 200
artists from all over the world. “In the last decade, the ‘official
art system’ has become more and more interested in the idea of
Latin American art, but those of us who work in this
environment know how fictitious some of these [stereotypes]
are,” says Brenner, “so my interest lies in looking at the possible
relationships between these countries.”

Rodrigo Ortiz Monasterio

Independent Curator and Founder of Guayaba Press, Mexico City,
Mexico
Recent career highlight: Passerby 02: Esther McCoy, Museo Jumex
A Mexican curator with ties to California, where he studied at
the California College of the Arts, Rodrigo Ortiz Monasterio
curates shows that often juxtapose alternate realities, such as
combining the pristine idealism of Minimalism and the promise
of Modernism with the harsh consequences that sweeping
ideologies bring to daily life in cities. This year, Monasterio
curated “Cuevas Civilizadas” at Guadalajara’s Ladera Oeste
with artists Leonor Antunes, Mario García Torres, Roma
Cortina, and Rometti Costales. Past projects include two
iterations of the “Passersby” series at Museo Jumex, one
featuring Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski, who visited
Mexico in the 1980s, and one exploring the work of the
American writer and architecture critic Esther McCoy and the
parts of the country that she encountered during her travels to
Mexico in the 1950s.

Emiliano Valdés
Head Curator at Museo de Arte Moderno, Medellín (MAMM),
Colombia
Recent career highlight: “Contrarrelatos” in the MAMM Collection
Portrait of Emiliano Valdés. Photo by Stefanía Ramírez. Courtesy of MAMM.

Now heading up Medellín’s Museo de Arte Moderno, an

institution in Colombia’s second largest city, Guatemalan
curator Emiliano Valdés rose to the forefront of one of the most
exciting artistic landscapes in Latin America after making a
name for himself as co-director of the Guatemala City
gallery Proyectos Ultravioleta, a powerhouse for experimental
art in Central America. Over the years, Valdés has devoted
much of his attention to the burgeoning performance world in
Guatemala, which is known for stalwarts of the genre such
as Regina José Galindo and Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa. Valdés
believes that this flourishing scene can be attributed to a strong
trend among Latin American artists toward the dematerialization
of art.

Stefan Benchoam and Jessica Kairé

Co-founders of El Nuevo Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (NuMu),
Guatemala City, Guatemala
Recent career highlight: “Paisaje Sonoro,” an exhibition by avant-
garde Guatemalan composer Joaquín Orellana, which traveled in a
replica of NuMu to LACMA as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA
Portrait of Stefan Benchoam and Jessica Kaireé. Photo by Arianne Engelberg. Courtesy of
NuMu.

In a minuscule, egg-shaped building in Guatemala City, artist

duo Jessica Kairé and Stefan Benchoam created the first and
only contemporary art museum and artist-run space in the
Central American country. Since its inception five years ago,
NuMu, or new museum, has indeed become a powerful and
quirky vitrine for some of the most innovative and expressive
artistic projects in Guatemala’s blossoming art scene. Local
artist Regina José Galindo, Mexican artist Mario García Torres,
and Argentine Amalia Pica are some of those that have occupied
this tiny space with their artworks and performances.
—Silas Marti
Header image: Pedestrian bridge by Oscar Niemeyer, Favela
da Rocinha, Gávea, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photo by Yann
Arthus-Bertrand, via Getty Images.