Luis Pérez-Oramas has been selected to organize the 30th São Paulo International Bienal. Born in Venezuela, Pérez-Oramas is curator of Latin American art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He joined the museum in 2003 as adjunct curator of drawings and assumed his current post in 2006.Pérez-Oramas will assemble a team of curators to assist with organizing the show, which last year featured 159 artists.
This is not his first outing with the São Paulo exhibition. In 1998 he co-curated the roundup under Paulo Herkenhoff, who, incidentally, became an adjunct curator at MoMA following his Bienal tenure. In 2007, Pérez-Oramas was among a team that co-curated the Bienal do Mercosul, also in Brazil. In addition to several exhibitions drawn from MoMA’s collection, he organized the recent “Tangled Alphabets” show, featuring the work of Mira Schendel and Léon Ferrari, which traveled to the Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Fundação Iberê Camargo in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Per an agreement between the Fundaçao Bienal and the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Pérez-Oramas, as the Bienal organizer, will also select the Brazilian representative for the 2013 Venice Biennale.
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.
IMAGE COURTESY MOMA
