Curatorial Projects

The Latin American Speakers Series

Regina José Galindo

REGINA JOSÉ GALINDO is a performance artist and writer whose work addresses the atrocities committed by Guatemalan dictatorships, social injustice, and discrimination on the basis of race and gender. Galindo isolates and embodies the vast suffering in Latin America by inflicting direct physical violence on her own body in highly symbolic gestures of resistance. She has exhibited and performed at numerous locations including: Exit Art (New York); Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem (The Netherlands); El Museo del Barrio (New York); MoMA PS1 (New York); and the 51st Venice Biennial, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion, the only Central American artist who has ever received the award. Galindo is considered to be one of the most subversive voices in contemporary art today.

Moderated by Magda Gonzalez-Mora

MAGDA GONZALEZ-MORA is an independent curator and art critic with an MA in Art History from Havana University. Gonzalez-Mora is founder of the Wilfredo Lam Contemporary Art Centre and the Havana Biennale. She is member of the curatorial team of Havana Biennale and manager of the Exhibition Department of the Wilfredo Lam Contemporary Art Centre. Magda Gonzalez-Mora was co-curator of the 1st Johannesburg Biennale in South Africa in 1995 and the Dakar Biennale in Senegal in 1992. Among her many curatorial projects it is worthy to mention: Vision: Desafios traveling video program for the Video Art Fair – Festival Loop (Barcelona), Sherritt Collection of Contemporary Cuban Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Strategies of Resistance, Espai, 2NOU2 (Barcelona), Exiles in Action, Pulse at Basel Miami, Parabolas from Jose Toirac – solo exhibition at MOCCA-Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), and Scanning, Cutting Edge Section in ARCO Fair (Madrid). A selection of publications include: Pabellón Cuba- a Reader on the Change in the Utopian in Art, Architecture and Film in Cuba; Cuba Avant-gard, the Farber Collection; and Cuba on the Verge: an Island in Transition.

Pablo Helguera

PABLO HELGUERA is an educator and artist working in installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance. His work as an educator has usually intersected his interest as an artist, making his work often reflect on issues of interpretation, dialogue, and the role of contemporary culture in a global reality. Helguera has exhibited and performed at numerous international venues, including the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), MoMA P.S.1 (New York), the Brooklyn Museum, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, the Bronx Museum, and most recently, the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City). In 2008, he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2011, he was named the winner of the International Award of Participatory Art of the Region Emilia-Romagna in Italy. Since 1991, Helguera has worked for a number of contemporary art museums. From 1998 to 2005, he was the head of public programs in the Education Department of the Guggenheim Museum (New York). Since 2007, he has been the Director of Adult and Academic Programs at the Museum of Modern Art (New York). In 2010, he was appointed the pedagogical curator of the 8th Mercosul Biennial (Porto Alegre).

Moderated by Victor Rivas

Professor VICTOR RIVAS’s interests range from Contemporary Latin American literature, film, and cultural studies; nineteenth-century Latin America and the ideological legacy of Simón Bolívar; cultural resistance, non-canonical, subaltern, and testimonial literature; comparative US and Canadian Latino/a texts; the politics of culture and media; and postmodern and postcolonial theory and criticism. As a journalist he has been published His work as a journalist was published by the Associated Press, USA Today and by El Nacional. He directed and produced three documentaries with Luna Lobo Films: Sanoja, Tambor y Canto. Andanzas y Memoria de un Decimista (2008), Estado Cultural: Hacia un Nuevo Paradigma de la Cultura Venezolana (2007), and Rejas: Poesía Carcelaria de Iván Padilla Bravo (2006). He teaches core courses for the Latin American Studies program at the University of Toronto: History, Civilization, and Culture and The Postcolonial Imaginary in Latin America. Professor Rivas received his PhD from the University of California.

Co-Presented by LACAP and Prefix.

Judy Baca

JUDY BACA is a Mexican-American renowned painter and muralist, community arts pioneer, scholar and educator who has dedicated her career to demonstrate the ways in which public art, created in partnership with community members, can be a force for social change. One of her first projects in 1969 was a collaborative mural aimed at tempering gang violence. She is co-founder of the first City of Los Angeles Mural Program, which evolved into a community arts organization known as the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). SPARC has been creating sites of public memory that address the identities and concerns of women, immigrants and the economically disadvantaged since 1976. Baca’s most celebrated work is The Great Wall of Los Angeles, a mural project begun in 1973 in the Tujunga Flood Control Channel of the San Fernando Valley. Completed over the course of five years, The Great Wall is a visual narrative of California’s history from the perspective of the underrepresented. Baca has been teaching art at UCLA Cesar E. Chavez Department of Chicana/o Studies and Department of World Arts and Cultures for the past 15 years.

Co-Presented by LACAP and the Community Arts Practice Program of the Faculty of Environmental Studies and Visual Arts Department at York University.

Mari Carmen Ramírez

MARI CARMEN RAMÍREZ is the first director of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas, based at the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston). Prior to joining the Museum of Fine Arts she was curator of Latin American Art at the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was also adjunct lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History. Ramírez has also served as Director of the Museo de Antropología, Historia y Arte de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, at the Río Piedras campus. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago in 1989. Ramírez has curated numerous critically praised exhibitions of Latin American art. She is also Chief Editor for the Yale University Press book series Critical Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art. In 2005, Ramírez was the recipient of the Award for Curatorial Excellence granted by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. That same year, TIME magazine named her one of “The 25 Most Influential Hispanics in America.” In 1997 she received the Peter Norton Family Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence.

Moderated by Dot Tuer

DOT TUER is a writer and cultural historian who specializes in Canadian and Latin American art and photography. Tuer holds a PhD in history from the University of Toronto and is Professor of Art History and Humanities at OCAD University, where she has served as the Acting Dean of Liberal Studies, Chair of CRCP (the undergraduate program in curatorial and critical studies housed in the Faculty of Art), and Interium Director of the Graduate Program in Curatorial and Critical Practices. Tuer is widely published in art magazines, peer-reviewed journals, and book anthologies. A collection of her essays on art, Mining the Media Archive, was published in 2006. She has received numerous awards for her writing on art and culture, including the Ontario Art Galleries Association Curatorial Writing Award, Toronto Arts Award, National Magazine Award, and Canada Council Senior Artist and Ontario Arts Council Literature grants. Tuer also works in the curatorial field. Most recently she was the Guest Curator for the Art Gallery of Ontario’s exhibition Frida and Diego: Passion, Politics, and Painting, 2013.

The Latin American Speakers Series

Regina José Galindo

Pablo Helguera

Judy Baca

Mari Carmen Ramírez

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

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2013

2012

2011