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Pablo Helguera will lead the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York
The Mexican artist, writer, and educator Pablo Helguera will assume the directorship of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York, an institution affiliated with The New School, where he will succeed Carin Kuoni, who has led the center for over two decades. His appointment marks the beginning of a new stage for a platform dedicated to researching and promoting dialogue between artistic practices, political thought, and social transformations.
With an established career in the international art field, Helguera has developed a practice that places the social and educational dimension of art at the center of his work. His projects explore the possibilities of participation, exchange, and collective knowledge building, expanding the traditional boundaries of artistic creation. Among his most notable initiatives is The School of Panamerican Unrest, a traveling project that organized more than a hundred public programs in twenty-five cities across twenty countries in the Americas.
He is also the promoter of Librería Donceles, a second-hand bookstore specializing in Spanish-language publications, which houses around 25,000 titles and has traveled to thirteen cities. This initiative reflects his interest in cultural meeting spaces, the circulation of ideas, and the creation of communities through words and knowledge.
His theoretical work includes two key publications on socially engaged art and the mechanisms of the art world: Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook (2011) and Art Scenes: The Social Scripts of the Art World (2012). In the curatorial field, he has developed projects such as “Club Americano,” presented at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 2017, and served as pedagogical curator for the 8th Mercosur Biennial.
His international recognition will be further expanded in 2027 with the presentation of “Pablo Helguera: Socialscapes,” a mid-career retrospective dedicated to him by the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, Nebraska. Throughout his career, he has received, among other distinctions, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Creative Capital grant, and recognitions from A Blade of Grass, Franklin Furnace, and Art Matters.
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