Pablo Helguera

Mexico

Pablo Helguera (Mexico, 1971) is a visual artist living and working in New York. His work ranges from installation to video, museum display, performance and discussion-based events. His most recent projects have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Parallel Lives, 2003), the 8th Havana Biennial (2003), and the Royal College of Art in London (2004). He has also exhibited or performed in Berlin, Bonn, Tokyo, Zagreb, Bogotá, Buenos Aires and Athens, and in institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum in Hagen, the Bronx Museum, the Banff Center in Canada, the Sculpture Center in New York, Ex Teresa Espacio Alternativo in Mexico City and the Shedhalle in Zurich. Since 1993 he has organized nearly a thousand education events geared to the public. He was the Senior Manager of Education of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Previous to that he worked as Manager of Education at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. In 2003, 2004 and 2005 he co-directed the forum of contemporary art experts of the ARCO art fair in Madrid. He directed the symposium ###i/i### (2002), a dual event taking place at the Center of the Arts in Mexico City and at the Guggenheim.

He has done a variety of experimental discussion/events such as the first forum of urban cultural purification (Mexico City, 2003), the first imaginary forum of mental sculpture (New York, 2004), and a reenactment of Plato’s Symposium with an art-theory perspective (Rincon, Puerto Rico, 2004). He is currently working as an artist in residence with the Bronx Museum to develop a long-term project on the history of the Grand Concourse.

He was awarded an artist grant from the Creative Capital Foundation, in order to pursue a traveling project throughout Latin America entitled The School of Panamerican Unrest, intended to serve as a nomadic think-tank to establish an alternative cultural network in the Americas. This Project physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between. Covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record as well as a pioneering work for the new generation of artworks regarded under the area of socially engaged art.

In 2012, Helguera received a PhD degree from Kingston University in London, and refined his role as an educator with engagement by the Museum of Modern Art. Helguera is the Director of Adult and Academic Programs at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

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