Miguel A. López
Over the last fifteen years, Miguel A. López has helped build cultural infrastructure in the South in various ways: creating or co-leading independent art spaces in places such as Lima (Peru), Cali (Colombia), or San José (Costa Rica); advancing experimental public programs in dialogue with artists, educators, and activists; generating archives, exhibitions, and publications that encourage critical debate; collaborating with art institutions to ensure plural access to cultural life; cooperating with museums to expand their collections under principles of democratic representation; and other actions aimed to empower the local art scenes in Latin America. At the Amant Siena Research & Studio Program, Miguel plans to complete a manuscript of a book that reflects on his work and experience in Costa Rica and Central America, where he lived between 2015 and 2021. The book combines essays on key female artists with whom he worked during that time as well as a personal account of the process of rethinking the governance structure of the non-profit visual arts organization TEOR/éTica.
Miguel A. López is a writer, researcher, and curator born and based in Lima, Peru. In his practice, he focuses on the role of art in politics and public life, collective work and collaborative dynamics, and queer and feminist rewritings of history. His texts have been published in journals such as Afterall, Artforum, e-flux Journal, Art in America, Journal of Visual Culture, Manifesta Journal. In 2019, he curated the retrospective exhibition Cecilia Vicuña: Seehearing the Enlightened Failure at the Witte de With (now Kunstinstituut Melly), Rotterdam, which traveled to Mexico City, Madrid, and Bogota. He was a recipient of the 2016 Independent Vision Curatorial Award. Miguel published Hard to Swallow: Anti-Patriarchal Poetics and New Scene in the Nineties (ICPNA, 2021), Ficciones disidentes en la tierra de la misoginia (Pesopluma, 2019), and The Words of Others: Leon Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War (together with Ruth Estévez and Agustín Diez Fischer, REDCAT and JRP-Ringier, 2017).