Programs
Overview of Programs
Collaboration and education are central tenets to the ethos of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC). As such, we have developed programs that strengthen networks and support the dissemination of scholarship on issues that are central to art and art-making practices in Latin America.
Please check back regularly as we update this list.
Seminario Fundación Cisneros
The Seminario Fundación Cisneros, organized by the CPPC teams in Caracas and New York, was a series of seminars held from 2011 to 2018. Each edition brought together a renowned group of local and international specialists to Caracas, where the programs were convened, to present unpublished papers around that year's thematic focus. The first seminar in 2011 was designed by Ariel Jiménez—CPPC Curator of Modern Art from 1997 to 2011—to promote the multidisciplinary study of culture alongside modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on the art of Latin America. The seminars from 2012 to 2017, under the direction of Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy—CPPC Curator of Contemporary Art from 2011 to 2017—were conceived as the result of fertile idea exchanges and collaborations taking place in Caracas. The final iteration of Seminario Fundación Cisneros in 2018 was developed by Ileana Ramírez, CPPC Program Director from 2015 to 2019.
Since its second edition, the Seminario Fundación Cisneros was conceived as a one-day conference accompanied by a cultural immersion program for participants to experience the local scene. Each seminar was also complemented by a series of face-to-face initiatives in Caracas that circulated regionally through original digital content for the general public. In addition to the keynote speakers, a group of artists, cultural producers, and creators active in Venezuela across various disciplines were regularly summoned to present Pecha Kuchas on that year's theme.
Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2011
Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2012
Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2013
Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2014
Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2015
Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2017
Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2018
Viewing Room
In 2014, then CPPC curator of contemporary art Sofía Hernandez Chong Cuy invited artist Alejandro Cesarco to co-curate the Viewing Room series with the goal of sharing seminal yet rarely seen artworks in the CPPC. The program consisted of five events in collaboration with key New York art institutions. For each iteration, a single artwork from the collection was exhibited in conjunction with a public program designed to articulate the working process and the contexts in which the work was created.
Viewing Room 1
Viewing Room 2
Viewing Room 3
Viewing Room 4
Viewing Room 5
Discusiones
The Discusiones program, a partnership with universities and cultural institutions throughout Venezuela, was a traveling series of lectures for university students and the general audience, providing access to themes and inquiries within the fields of visual art, architecture, music, literature, design, and film. These programs, spanning five cycles, invited subject specialists to lead conversations that approach art from multiple, critical perspectives.
Discusiones Cycle #1
Discusiones Cycle #2
Discusiones Cycle #3
Discusiones Cycle #4
Discusiones Cycle #5
Arte en contexto
Arte en contexto was a series of events developed by Ileana Ramírez—CPPC Programs Director from 2015 to 2019—in order to foster reflection and debate around relevant issues in the field of art and its transdisciplinary connections. These sessions brought the artistic community together within the context of production and distribution, generating discussions around art practices and spaces of mediation. Four iterations of Arte en contexto took place in Caracas between 2017 and 2018
Arte en contexto #1
Arte en contexto #2
Arte en contexto #3
Arte en contexto #4
Conexiones emergentes
From 2012 through 2019, Conexiones Emergentes served as an exchange between emerging Venezuelan artists, art students and/or self-taught professionals with key players in the Caracas art scene: curators, journalists, artists, and cultural promoters. The program provided a synergistic platform for exchange, offering artists the opportunity to present and discuss their proposals, and for cultural agents to be introduced to new innovators in the field.
Please check back regularly as we update this list.
Seminario Fundación Cisneros
The Seminario Fundación Cisneros, organized by the CPPC teams in Caracas and New York, was a series of seminars held from 2011 to 2018. Each edition brought together a renowned group of local and international specialists to Caracas, where the programs were convened, to present unpublished papers around that year's thematic focus. The first seminar in 2011 was designed by Ariel Jiménez—CPPC Curator of Modern Art from 1997 to 2011—to promote the multidisciplinary study of culture alongside modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on the art of Latin America. The seminars from 2012 to 2017, under the direction of Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy—CPPC Curator of Contemporary Art from 2011 to 2017—were conceived as the result of fertile idea exchanges and collaborations taking place in Caracas. The final iteration of Seminario Fundación Cisneros in 2018 was developed by Ileana Ramírez, CPPC Program Director from 2015 to 2019.
Since its second edition, the Seminario Fundación Cisneros was conceived as a one-day conference accompanied by a cultural immersion program for participants to experience the local scene. Each seminar was also complemented by a series of face-to-face initiatives in Caracas that circulated regionally through original digital content for the general public. In addition to the keynote speakers, a group of artists, cultural producers, and creators active in Venezuela across various disciplines were regularly summoned to present Pecha Kuchas on that year's theme.
Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2011
Piet Mondrian: Parallel Readings
January 26, 2011
Trasnocho Cultural Theater, Caracas
The central theme for the first Seminario Fundación Cisneros focused on the work of Dutch painter and art theoretician Piet Mondrian, specifically the various readings of his work made by artists in France, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela.
For more information: Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2011 page
For more information: Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2011 page
Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2012
The Betrayal of the Contemporary: Activations, Suspensions and Projections of the Contemporary in Art
November 9, 201
Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas
The second Seminario Fundación Cisneros was conceived as a space to reflect upon and discuss the various attempts to define the contemporary, particularly through the arts. The seminar covered the philosophical lines between concepts and techniques; technology and experimentation; access and limitations to the markets of ideas and art; and the uses or references to histories of art and visual culture.
For more information: Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2012 page
For more information: Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2012 page
Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2013
Promises of the Commons: Authorship, Copyright and Access in Contemporary Art
November 15, 2013
Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas
The third Seminario Fundación Cisneros focused on exploring how the arts have been impacted by the array of mechanisms of collaboration, reproduction, and uses of the public commons that emerged over the last decades, and how they themselves have impacted the way we conceptualize ideas of the public and the private.
For more information: Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2013 page
For more information: Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2013 page
Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2014
Acts of Learning: Or How to Sensibly Comprehend Curiosity, Will, and Chance
November 7—14, 2014
Centro de Arte Los Galpones; Lugar Común; Taller Experimental de Teatro; and Fundación Cisneros Caracas HQ,
The fourth edition of the Seminario Fundación Cisneros focused on arts pedagogy, education systems, and ways of learning about culture with art. The seminar explored histories of art and artistic formation, genealogies of critical thinking, as well as manners in which the arts have or could radically shape perceptions and realities that grant individual and social potentials.
For more information: Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2014 page
For more information: Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2014 page
Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2015
After Landscape: Perspectives and Traces of the Traveler
October 16, 2015
Asociación Cultural Humboldt, Caracas,
The fifth edition of Seminario Fundación Cisneros featured presentations by artists, curators, writers, and historians on the subject of landscape. The seminar addressed forms of cultural visualization: why, how, by and for whom lands have been depicted.
For more information: Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2015 page
For more information: Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2015 page
Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2017
Show & Tell: Systems in the 1960s, Exhibitions in the 1990s, Projects for 2020
March 17, 2017
Centro Cultural Chacao, Caracas
The sixth edition of Seminario Fundación Cisneros examined influential cultural producers and ground-breaking exhibitions in Latin America in the 1960s and 1990s, and presented speculative cultural proposals that might be created in Venezuela in the year 2020.
For more information: Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2017 page
For more information: Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2017 page
Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2018
Disruptions: Dilemmas Regarding the Image in Contemporaneity
March 16, 2018
Centro Cultural Chacao, Caracas
The seventh and final edition of the Seminario Fundación Cisneros focused on recognizing the articulations between art and politics in contemporary culture, and distinguishing the areas where they may overlap.
For more information: Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2018 page
For more information: Seminario Fundación Cisneros 2018 page
Viewing Room
In 2014, then CPPC curator of contemporary art Sofía Hernandez Chong Cuy invited artist Alejandro Cesarco to co-curate the Viewing Room series with the goal of sharing seminal yet rarely seen artworks in the CPPC. The program consisted of five events in collaboration with key New York art institutions. For each iteration, a single artwork from the collection was exhibited in conjunction with a public program designed to articulate the working process and the contexts in which the work was created.
Viewing Room 1
May 9, 2014
Crozier Fine Arts
Lothar Baumgarten, Eine Reise, oder mit der MS Remscheid auf dem Amazonas (A Journey, or with the MS Remscheid on the Amazon) (1968–1972)
Presentation by Thomas Bartscherer, Director of the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College
For more information: Viewing Room 1 exhibition page
For more information: Viewing Room 1 exhibition page
Viewing Room 2
January 5, 2015
The Kitchen
Regina José Galindo, Looting (2010)
Presentation by Mark Beasley, curator of Performa in New York, and original music performed by Arto Lindsay
For more information: Viewing Room 2 exhibition page
For more information: Viewing Room 2 exhibition page
Viewing Room 3
July 21, 2015
SculptureCenter
Michael Stevenson, The Fountain of Prosperity (2007)
Presentations by curator Lauren Cornell, critic Jason Farago, and anthropologist Michael Taussig
For more information: Viewing Room 3 exhibition page
For more information: Viewing Room 3 exhibition page
Viewing Room 4
November 16, 2016
Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the New School
Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves, Secretos de la Amazonía/Río Tomo (2011)
Presentation by architect Paulo Tavares on Amazonía project
For more information: Viewing Room 4 exhibition page
For more information: Viewing Room 4 exhibition page
Viewing Room 5
September 8, 2016
Storefront for Art and Architecture
Leandro Katz, The Catherwood Project (1985–1993)
Presentations by art historian Julia Herzberg, curator Eugenie Tsai, poet David Shapiro, and artists Lize Mogel and John Emerson
For more information: Viewing Room 5 exhibition page
For more information: Viewing Room 5 exhibition page
Discusiones
The Discusiones program, a partnership with universities and cultural institutions throughout Venezuela, was a traveling series of lectures for university students and the general audience, providing access to themes and inquiries within the fields of visual art, architecture, music, literature, design, and film. These programs, spanning five cycles, invited subject specialists to lead conversations that approach art from multiple, critical perspectives.
Discusiones Cycle #1
The Avant-Garde of the 20th Century
April 2010–September 2011
Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas; Universidad Nacional Experimental del Yaracuy; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del Zulia
This first Discusiones cycle, which referenced Impressionism and Postimpressionism, was led Ariel Jiménez—then CPPC Curator of Modern Art Ariel Jiménez—alongside Félix Suazo, artist and art graduate researcher at the Instituto Superior de Arte de La Habana (Cuba). During their presentations, participants defined the essential characteristics of these two artistic periods and the problems that paved the way for the various movements of the twenty-first century.
For more information: Discusiones Cycle #1 page
For more information: Discusiones Cycle #1 page
Discusiones Cycle #2
The Declension of the Modern in Latin America
November 2011–May 2013
Universidad Central de Venezuela; Universidad Católica Andrés Bello; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del Zulia; Universidad de Los Andes, Mérida; Galería Universitaria Braulio Salazar; Universidad de Margarita
The second cycle of the Discusiones lectures, dedicated to the Venezuelan artist Gego (b. Germany, 1912–2012) on the occasion of her 100th birthday, continued the line of inquiry initiated by the first Discusiones series on various modernist artistic expressions within the visual arts, architecture, music, poetry, and literature. Through twelve events held in six universities across Venezuela, this cycle explored a variety of themes including Universal Constructivism, Muralism, and Neoclassical-Modernism as expressed in Latin American countries including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
For more information: Discusiones Cycle #2 page
For more information: Discusiones Cycle #2 page
Discusiones Cycle #3
Art in Venezuela: From Modernity to the Present. Affirmations and Ruptures
November 2013–November 2015
Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, Guayana; Universidad de Margarita, Porlamar; Galería Universitaria Braulio Salazar, Valencia; Centro de Arte de Maracaibo Lía Bermúdez; Universidad Central de Venezuela; Universidad Simón Bolívar; Universidad Católica Andrés Bello
This third iteration of Discusiones examined various themes related to modernity in Venezuela through the work and ideas of figures like Armando Reverón, Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Otero, Gego, Carlos Raúl Villanueva, and groups like El Círculo de Bellas Artes, Los Disidentes, Sardio, and Techo de la Ballena. Curator and academic María Elena Ramos organized this and subsequent cycles of Discusiones.
For more information: Discusiones Cycle #3 page
For more information: Discusiones Cycle #3 page
Discusiones Cycle #4
Of SEEING, LISTENING, READING and THINKING art
June 2016–November 2018
Centro de Arte de Maracaibo Lía Bermúdez; Hotel Hesperia WTC Valencia, CAF, Banco de Desarrollo de América Latina; Universidad Católica Andrés Bello
This fourth cycle of Discusiones, comprising eight meetings held in four cultural institutions and universities, focused on the active experience of seeing and its parallels: listening, reading, perceiving, feeling, and thinking. This edition explored two ways of relating art and education: education for art—to better understand artistic languages by honing perceptions of artworks—and education in favor of art: to shift our world perspective through particular artistic creations.
For more information: Discusiones Cycle #4 page
For more information: Discusiones Cycle #4 page
Discusiones Cycle #5
Images of Art: Revelations of Violence
April 2019—
April 2019—
Universidad Católica Andrés Bello;
This fifth edition of Discusiones was structured around the relationships between art, ethics, society, anthropology, and politics. Speakers in this cycle reflected on how structures of violence act within languages of art. They also analyzed modes of manifesting uncertainty, dissonance, disruption, and skepticism when materialized in visual, literary, musical, cinematographic, architectural, and graphic forms.
For more information: Discusiones Cycle #5 page
For more information: Discusiones Cycle #5 page
Arte en contexto
Arte en contexto was a series of events developed by Ileana Ramírez—CPPC Programs Director from 2015 to 2019—in order to foster reflection and debate around relevant issues in the field of art and its transdisciplinary connections. These sessions brought the artistic community together within the context of production and distribution, generating discussions around art practices and spaces of mediation. Four iterations of Arte en contexto took place in Caracas between 2017 and 2018
Arte en contexto #1
September 21, 2017
Experiences in artistic residencies: politics of exchange and practices of the trade.
Centro de Arte Los Galpones
Organizers from seven Caracas-based artistic residencies discussed their initiatives' histories, models of management, operation, and financing. The event was hosted and organized in collaboration with Centro de Arte Los Galpones, and featured representatives from El Avispero, La Macolla Creativa, La ONG, Taller Abierto, Terra Gráfica, La Llama, and the International Residency Program MACZUL.
For more information: Arte en contexto #1 page
For more information: Arte en contexto #1 page
Arte en contexto #2
October 5, 2017
Artists’ Residencies, Venezuelans Abroad
Centro de Arte Los Galpones
This iteration explored the processes and experiences of artists and researchers who have traveled and/or worked remotely in residencies outside Venezuela. Part one of the event featured a panel discussion with curator and researcher Aixa Sánchez alongside artists Esmelyn Miranda, Alberto Morreo, Dulce Gómez, María Bilbao. The second part consisted of a virtual session with artists Suwon Lee, Lucia Pizzani, Raily Yance, Miguel Braceli, Armando Rosales, Ana Mosquera, Oscar Abraham Pabón, and Diana Rangel.
For more information: Arte en contexto #2 page
For more information: Arte en contexto #2 page
Arte en contexto #3
July 1, 2018
Evanescence of a Line: The Work as a Poetic Body and Social Line
Espacio Monitor
Co-organized and hosted by Espacio Monitor, this third edition of Arte en contexto featured a talk between the curator Lorena González and the artist Miguel Braceli within the framework of the exhibition, Miguel Braceli 1:1. Thinking with the body (July 2018). The exhibition was Braceli's first solo exhibition in Venezuela, and presented a set of large-format installations composed of materials used in public interventions and participatory outdoor actions.
For more information: Arte en contexto #3 page
For more information: Arte en contexto #3 page
Arte en contexto #4
November 10, 2018
Three Readings on Venezuelan Art and Computers
Centro de Arte Los Galpones
This fourth iteration of Arte en contexto, organized in collaboration with Centro de Arte Los Galpones, featured a conversation about the relationship between art and computers with Sandra Pinardi (researcher and curator), Augusto Gerardi (artist and audiovisual producer), and Elías Crespín (artist).
For more information: Arte en contexto #4 page
For more information: Arte en contexto #4 page
Conexiones emergentes
From 2012 through 2019, Conexiones Emergentes served as an exchange between emerging Venezuelan artists, art students and/or self-taught professionals with key players in the Caracas art scene: curators, journalists, artists, and cultural promoters. The program provided a synergistic platform for exchange, offering artists the opportunity to present and discuss their proposals, and for cultural agents to be introduced to new innovators in the field.