José Luis Blondet, Curator

José Luis Blondet is Curator of Special Initiatives at LACMA, where he has organized the exhibitions Not I: Throwing Voices 1500 BCE - 2020; Merce Cunningham, Clouds and Screens (2018); Liz Glynn: The Myth of Singularity (2016); Various Small Fires (Working Documents) (2015); and Compass for Surveyors: 19th-Century American Landscapes (2013). He has been the co-curator of A Universal History of Infamy (2017); and Maria Nordman: FILM-ROOM Smoke, 1967-Present (2011). Blondet has also commissioned several performance projects for the museum, including projects by Fallen Fruit, Liz Glynn, Asher Hartman, Jennie MaryTai Liu, Rachel Mason, Emily Mast, Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo),, Fallen Fruit, among others. 

He previously held positions at the Dia Art Foundation, New York; Universidad Central de Venezuela; and Museum of Fine Arts, Caracas. Blondet is guest faculty at the School of Theater at Calarts.

 

Willie Cole, Artist

Willie Cole is a contemporary American sculptor, printer, designer, perceptual engineer, and visual artist. A figure of postmodern eclecticism, Cole’s work often reflects traditional African imagery, through the use of found objects.

Willie Cole (b. 1955 in Somerville, New Jersey) lives and works in New Jersey.

His work has been the subject of several one-person museum exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1998), Bronx Museum of the Arts (2001), Miami Art Museum (2001), Tampa Museum of Art (2004), University of Wyoming Art Museum (2006), Montclair Art Museum (2006), College of Wooster Art Museum (2013-14).

In 2010, a survey exhibition of his work on paper (1975-2010) took place at the James Gallery of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and traveled to Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, University of Alabama and Rowan University Art Gallery, New Jersey.

Several of his sculptures were included in “Reconfiguring an African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2011).  In 2013, a traveling exhibition “Complex Conversations: Willie Cole Sculptures and Wall Works” opened at Albertine Monroe-Brown Gallery at Western Michigan University.

In 2015, Cole’s work was included in “Represent: 200 Years of African American Art” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and “Wild Noise: Artwork from the Bronx Museum of the Arts” at El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana. In 2016, his work was included in “Disguise: Masks and Global African Art” at the Brooklyn Museum.

“Willie Cole: On-Site” opened at the David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland and traveled to the Museum of Art at the University of New Hampshire, and Arthur Ross Gallery, Philadelphia in 2016. The following year, Cole had solo exhibitions at the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame and at the College of Architecture and Design Gallery at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. In 2019, “Willie Cole: Beauties” opened at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University as well as “Willie Cole: Bella Figura” at Alexander and Bonin, New York.

 

Ayşe Erkmen, Artist

She lives and works in Berlin and Istanbul. In 1993, she participated in the prestigious DAAD International Artist Residency Program in Berlin. Erkmen was Arnold Bode Professor at Kassel Art Academy and taught at Frankfurt Städelschule. Among the international exhibitions Erkmen has participated in are the 2nd, 3rd and 13th Istanbul Biennial; the Turkish pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale; Manifesta 1, Shanghai, Berlin, Gwangju, Sharjah, Limerick, Scape, Sinopale and Çanakkale Biennials; and the Folkestone and Echigo Tsunami Triennials. Erkmen participated in Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017 with a project entitled On Water. In 2020, she is granted the prestigious triennial Ernst Franz Vogelmann Sculpture Award.

 

Coco Fusco, Artist and Writer

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. Fusco's performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008, and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York. 

Fusco is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (2015). She is also the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). She contributes regularly to The New York Review of Books and numerous art publications. Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985) and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007). Fusco is a Professor at the Cooper Union School of Art

 

Ines Katzenstein, Curator

Inés Katzenstein is Curator of Latin American Art and the inaugural Director of the Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In her role as curator, she helps conceive the Museum’s collection displays, and heads the Latin American and Caribbean Fund, which is dedicated to acquisitions from the region. She has organized two major exhibitions based on the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift: Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction (2019, with Maria Amalia García) and Chosen Memories (2023). In 2021 she was part of the curatorial team for Greater New York at MoMA PS1.

From 2008 to 2018, she was the founding director of the Art Department at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, where she created and oversaw an educational program for artists and curators, as well as an exhibition program. She organized monographic exhibitions of David Lamelas, Liliana Porter, Marcelo Pombo and Guillermo Kuitca, among other artists. 

Previously, she was Curator at Malba-Fundación Costantini, and the editor of "Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde", published by The Museum of Modern Art in 2004. She holds a master’s degree from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a BA from the Universidad de Buenos Aires.

 

Hyunjin Kim, Curator and Writer

Hyunjin Kim is a curator and writer in Seoul. Kim was recently the Artistic Director of Incheon Art Platform 2021 and the KADIST Lead Curator for Asia, with which she developed her three-year program, Frequency of Tradition. She also worked as the curator of the Korean Pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2019, a co-curator of the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008), and the Director of Arko Art Center, Seoul (2014-15). In addition, Kim was a member of the advisory board for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2014-16) and a jury member for the DAAD Berlin artists-in-residence program (2017-18).

 

Juan Maidagan, Artist

Juan Maidagan studied medicine at the National University of Rosario Medical School (1976 – 82). He engaged in group projects focusing on biodiversity, as seasonal and interannual waterbird surveys in the Laguna Melincue, Santa Fé and behavior and demography in an urban colony of Tadarida Brasiliensis in Rosario. He has held various teaching positions and served as visiting artist at a wide range of art institutions. Juan Maidagan is one half of the art collaborative Zinny-Maidagan.

 

Sohrab Mohebbi, Curator

Sohrab Mohebbi was appointed Director of SculptureCenter in 2022. He served as the Kathe and Jim Patrinos Curator of the 58th Carnegie International,2022.  Mohebbi has also served as SculptureCenter’s Curator-at-Large (2020-21) and as Curator between 2018 and 2020. 

He was an associate curator at REDCAT in Los Angeles and a curatorial fellow at the Queens Museum. He is an advisor at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and has organized exhibitions and programs for the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree, CA; SALT, Istanbul; and the Center for Historical Reenactments, Johannesburg, South Africa. He received an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a BFA in photography from Tehran Art University.

 

Matt Mullican, Artist 

Matt Mullican was born in Santa Monica, California to parents Lee Mullican and Luchita Hurtado. His mother was Venezuelan-born. In childhood he lived in Caracas, Venezuela for one year.

 Mullican received his BFA degree from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1974. His work is concerned with systems of knowledge, meaning, language, and signification. Mullican also works with the relationship between perception and reality, between the ability to see something and the ability to represent it. Since the 1970s, Mullican has been known for his performances done while under hypnosis. During these performances, Mullican channels an alter ego known as 'That Person', who displays extreme and erratic behavior. Drawings made by Mullican while hypnotized are frequently exhibited and attributed to 'That Person'.

 Mullican's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally since the early 1970s at venues including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Haus Der Kunst, Munich, Germany, the National Galerie, Berlin, Germany, the Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, Netherlands, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, and The Museum of Modern Art.

 

Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, Curator

Senior Curator at National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum He curated artist Charles Lim’s work Sea State, representing Singapore at the 2015 Venice Biennale. He received the prestigious 2017 (DAAD) International Scholarship For Artists in Berlin, Germany. Mustafa worked with Mohammad Din Mohammad’s family to curate and catalog the artist’s works stored in their home.

 

Jessica Rankin, Artist

Jessica Rankin (b.1971, Sydney, Australia), represented by White Cube Gallery, lives and works in New York. Rankin creates expansive sculptural paintings depicting maps of landscapes dotted with codes, signs, and symbols that refer to the processes of memory, intuition, and interpretation. Mountain ranges, constellations, thermodynamic readings, lines of stream-of-consciousness text, and neurological signals morph, merge, and stretch across her embroideries and works on paper. Expansive and intuitive, Rankin's works are also often marked by swathes of vibrant colour that appear as stains, splotches, or coiling lines.  Rankin's exuberant compositions spill over to the sides of the canvas, which reveal intricately hand embroidered lines of poetry by writers such as Etel Adnan, Paul Celan, Carl Phillips, Kamilah and Aisha Moont whose writings have inspired Rankin’s work. Her love for poetry extends beyond the canvas to hosted poetry readings. Rankin had a two person exhibition with Julie Mehretu at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Belgium in 2016. Selected solo exhibitions include SCAD, Atlanta; PS1 Contemporary Arts Center, New York; and Franklin Artworks, Minneapolis. She is featured in public collections such as Saatchi Gallery, London and Touchstones, Rochdale, UK. 

 

Asad Raza, Artist, Curator and Writer

Asad Raza (b. 1974, Buffalo, NY) is a Pakistani, New York-based artist, activist, teacher, writer, director and curator who combines experiences, human and non-human beings, and objects in his work. Often exploring dialogical exchanges and rejecting disciplinary boundaries, Raza conceives of art as a metabolic, active experience. Most recently, Raza has been named Artistic Director of the 2025 Front International Triennial in Cleveland, Ohio. Some recent works include - Absorption, in which a group of cultivators create over 300 tons of "neosoil," was shown as the 34th Kaldor Public Art Project in Sydney in 2019, and at the Gropius Bau, Berlin in 2020. Untitled (plot for dialogue), in 2017, he installed a tennis-like game in a deconsecrated sixteenth-century church in Milan. Root sequence. Mother tongue—first exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennial-combines twenty-six trees, caretakers and objects. Schema, for a school was an experimental school at the 2015 Ljubljana Graphic Art Biennial  Raza's work often inhabits intimate settings such as The Bedroom, at the 2018 Lahore Biennale. Or home show (2015), which took place at his apartment in New York. Life to come (2019) at Metro Pictures featured participatory works and Shaker dance. Raza premiered Minor History, a filmed dialogue with his 91 year old uncle, at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2019. 

 

Amie Siegal, Artist

Amie Siegel (b. 1974, Chicago, IL) is a visual artist working variously with film, video, photography, sound, performance and installation. She is known for her layered, meticulously constructed works that trace and perform the undercurrents of systems of value, cultural ownership and image-making.

Recent solo exhibitions include Panorama, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2023); Bloodlines, Scottish National Museum Gallery of Modern Art (2022); The Silence, ArkDes, Stockholm (2022); Medium Cool, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2019); In Focus: Amie Siegel – Provenance, Tate St. Ives (2018); Winter, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2017); Strata, South London Gallery (2017); Double Negative, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2016); Ricochet, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2016) and Imitation of Life, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2016). She has participated in the 34th São Paulo Bienal; 12th Gwangju Biennial; Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh; Glasgow International, Scotland; 5th Auckland Triennial, New Zealand; and the Whitney Biennial, among numerous other group exhibitions. 

Siegel’s work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Art Institute of Chicago; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand; MAK-Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum, New York and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Her films have screened at the Cannes, Berlin, Toronto, Rotterdam and New York film festivals. She has been a fellow of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and Guggenheim Foundation, a Fulton Fellow at The Film Study Center at Harvard University and a Smithsonian Artist Fellow. Siegel has received numerous grants and awards including from the Sundance Institute, Princess Grace Foundation, ICA Boston (Foster Prize), Creative Capital, Anonymous Was a Woman and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York. In 2023 she was an Artist-in-Residence at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT.

 

Javier Tellez, Artist

Javier Téllez is a New York based artist born in Venezuela. His work reflects a sustained interest in bringing peripheral communities and invisible situations to the fore of contemporary art addressing disabilities and mental illness as marginalizing conditions. Tellez’s projects have often involved working in collaboration with people diagnosed with mental illness to produce film installations that question the notions of the normal and the pathological. 

Téllez has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Thurgau Kunstmuseum,  Switzerland (2022); Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2018); the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester (2018); the Blanton Museum, Austin; the San Francisco Art Institute (2014); Kunsthaus Zürich (2014); SMAK, Ghent (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2011); Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2005); and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2004). He has participated in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Long Island City; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Castello di Rivoli, Torino; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; ICA, Boston; and Renaissance Society, Chicago, as well as Aichi Triennial (2019); dOCUMENTA, Kassel, Germany (2012); Manifesta, Trento, Italy; Sydney Biennial; and the Whitney Biennial, New York (all 2008); Venice Biennale (2001 and 2003); and Yokohama Triennial (2001). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999, and in 2016 the Global Mental Health Award for Innovation in the Arts from Columbia University, New York.  

 

Paulina Pobocha, Curator 

Paulina Pobocha works in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. At MoMA she has organized Constantin Brancusi Sculpture, 2018; Rachel Harrison: Perth Amboy, 2016; Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor, 2013 (with Ann Temkin); Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store, 2013; and others. She is central in the conception and display of the Museum's contemporary collection galleries, 1970s-present. In 2023 she will organize three collection-focused exhibitions at MoMA including Random-Access Memory: The Rise of Digital Computing at the End of the Cold War; and Mike Kelley: Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites. Currently Pobocha is working with artist Thomas Schütte on a forthcoming retrospective exhibition of his work (Sep-tember 2024). In her curatorial practice, she is committed to understanding art as part of the larger social and political landscape, and in centering the voice of the artist within that context. Pobocha has served as Critic at the Yale School of Art. Her writing appears in numerous publications; this year she will author two books: Alex Da Corte: Mouse Museum (Van Gogh Ear) and Mike Kelley: Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites. Pobocha received her B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University and her M. Phil. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.