Curators

/Carolina Ponce de León/ HERE/NOW Curator

Carolina Ponce de León is a renowned curator and critic in the visual arts. She has served as the Visual Arts Advisor at the Ministry of Culture, Director/Curator of Visual Arts at the Luis Ángel Arango Library, and Curator of the Museo del Barrio in New York, among other functions. As an art critic she has published columns in well-known Colombian newspapers, and articles in international academic publications.

She was Director/Curator of Visual Arts at the Luis Ángel Arango Library (1984-1994) where she launched and curated the New Names program, which was instrumental in defining the art of the new artistic generations of the eighties and nineties, and curated seminal exhibitions like Ante América (together with the Cuban curator Gerardo Mosquera and the American Rachel Weiss). She was curator of the Museo del Barrio in New York where she curated the retrospective exhibit Beatriz González: What an honor to be with you in this historic moment (1998), as well as Artistic Director of the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco (1999-2011) where she curated Viology: Violence of Culture / Culture of Violence (2003).

Her most recent curatorial project was La Vuelta: 28 contemporary photographers and artists from Colombia featured in Les Rencontres de la Photographie, in Arles, France and Faire Face: Beatriz González and José Alejandro Restrepo at the Musée d’Art Contemporain Le Carré d’Art, in Nîmes, France. Along with Santiago Rueda, she is curator of the current presentation of the Contemporary Art Collection of the Banco de la República. Her curatorial projects have earned the recognition and support of the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C.; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York; the Creative Work Fund, San Francisco; the California Arts Council, Sacramento; the National Association of Latino Arts & Culture, San Antonio; and The San Francisco Foundation, San Francisco.

As an art critic she has published weekly columns in the most widely circulated newspapers in Colombia, El Tiempo and El Espectador. She is the author of El Efecto Mariposa: Ensayos Críticos sobre arte y cultura en Colombia 1985-2000 (IDCT, 2004); Jesús Abad Colorado: Mirar de la Vida Profunda (Paralelo 10/Editorial Planeta, 2015); y Roldán (Villegas Editores, 2014), as well as essays in anthologies edited by MIT Press (Cambridge), INIVA (London) and the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York); and articles and reviews for catalogues and specialized magazines, such as Art in America (USA), Art Nexus (Colombia), Bomb Magazine (USA), Parkett (Zurich) and Polyester (Mexico). She has been a professor in graduate programs in Visual Criticism and Curatorial Practices at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She lives in Bogotá, Colombia.

/Stephen Ferry/ Ojo Rojo Fábrica Visual, curator documentary photography component with Carolina Ponce de León 

Since the late 1980s, Stephen Ferry has traveled to dozens of countries, covering social and political change, human rights, and the environment, on assignment for publications such as National Geographic, GEO, TIME and the New York Times. A fluent Spanish speaker, Stephen has developed an understanding of Latin America from over twenty years of covering the region. Stephen’s first book, I Am Rich Potosí: The Mountain that Eats Men (Monacelli Press, 1999), documents the lives of the Quechua miners of Potosí, Bolivia. His second book Violentology: A Manual of the Colombian Conflict (Umbrage, 2012) has become a referential work for the study of Colombian history, armed conflict and human rights. In 2018, Stephen and his sister, the anthropologist Elizabeth Ferry, published La Batea (Icono/Red Hook Editions, 2018).

Ferry has won honors from the World Press Photo, Picture of the Year, and Best of Photojournalism contests. He has also received grants from the National Geographic Expeditions Council, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the Howard Chapnick Fund, the Knight International Press Fellowship, the Getty Images Grant for Good, Open Society Foundations and the Magnum Foundation.

/Simone Swildens/

Organizer, Research and writer HERE/NOW

Simone Swildens is an independent curator, initiator, and concept writer based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, who organizes exhibitions in the Netherlands and abroad. Since 2001, she has been the director of Artiful, dedicated to the promotion of authentic Aboriginal art. From 2005 to 2015, she was the founder, chairman and curator of Stichting Art in Redlight, an annual multidisciplinary recurring platform under the name Art in Redlight, held in the Old Church in Amsterdam.

As from 2013, Art in Redlight took place in their new home the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. Art in Redlight —nowadays known as www.thisartfair.com— aims to present and sell the work of individual artists, both established and emerging, connected or unrelated to a gallery or collective, within a professional setting. The Foundation supports artists as well as their entrepreneurship. In 2015, Art in Redlight was handed over after ten years to a young team since they will do the same after a period of ten years.