Sao Paulo Biennial Foundation Names Luis Pérez-Oramas as Curator for its 30th Edition
Luis Pérez-Oramas, The Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York has been named as chief curator for the 30th São Paulo International Biennial. He joined the museum in 2003 as adjunct curator of drawings and assumed his current post in 2006. In 1998, Pérez Oramas co-curated the roundup under Paulo Herkenhoff. In 2007, Pérez-Oramas was among a team that cocurated the Mercosur Biennial, also in Brazil. Per an agreement between the Fundaçao Bienal and the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Pérez-Oramas, as the Biennial’s organizer, will also select the Brazilian representative for the 2013 Venice Biennale. Heitor Martins, president of Fundação Bienal, points out that “as a Latin American curator acting in a global platform and with an excellent reputation in the Brazilian art circuit, I trust that Luis Pérez-Oramas will offer an extremely positive contribution in order to position the São Paulo’ Biennial in the three domains that the institution interacts with: Brazil, Latin America and the world.”
The appointment process of the new curator began in October 2010, when the Board of Directors of the Fundação Bienal eval- uated the background of some 20 potential candidates for the position. Following its strategic process, and after reviewing the candidates’ qualifications and the challenges involved in the organization of the 30th Biennial, three candidates were select- ed and invited to present preliminary projects.
After a careful analysis of the documents, the one submitted by Pérez-Oramas was retained as the most adequate. “I am pleased to announce, after a judicious evaluation process, the choice of Pérez-Oramas as our next curator. Making this announcement in February provides adequate time for the curator to thoroughly develop his research with the goal of produc- ing a first rate exhibition,” Martins commented.
Pérez-Oramas is expected to begin working as soon as the appointment is made public, putting together the curatorial team that will accompany him in the process of organizing the Biennial. The curator will be also responsible for the 30th Biennial’s traveling shows to be held in 2013. Pérez-Oramas was born in 1960 in Caracas and lives in New York. He is an art historian, a writer and a poet, and completed a PhD in Art History at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). He curated at MoMA the recent “Tangled Alphabets” show, featuring the work of Mira Schendel and León Ferrari, which traveled to the Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Fundação Iberê Camargo in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Perez Oramas also organized other shows at MoMA, among them “Latin American and Caribbean Art: Selections from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art”, in 2008; “New Perspectives in Latin American Art”, in 2007; and “Transforming Chronologies: An Atlas of Drawings”, in 2006. Pérez-Oramas will take a partial leave of absence from MoMA while organizing the exhibition, which is scheduled for September–December 2012. He will return to the museum full- time in 2013.
