New Perspectives on Contemporary Colombian Art: Oscar Muñoz in Context

Jerónimo Duarte-Riascos is an Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. His research, teaching, and curatorial projects concentrate on modern and contemporary artistic practices with special attention to their literary and visual manifestations in Latin America. He completed his Ph.D. in Spanish and Latin American Literatures with a secondary field in Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Prior to joining Columbia, Duarte-Riascos was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University and lectured at The University of Chicago and Harvard University. He has worked at several museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Harvard Art Museums, and he is a founding member of the curatorial collective De cabeza curaduría. He lives and works in New York. 

Bernardo Ortiz is a draughtsman and writer. He holds a BFA in Arts from the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá) and MA in Philosophy from the Universidad del Valle (Cali). Recent solo shows include: Balance (Alarcón Criado, Seville); Low Resolution (Casas Riegner, Bogotá); Friction (Luisa Strina, São Paulo); and Erase (Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires). He has participated in such seminal group shows as the 30^th Bienal de São Paulo (Brazil); XI Bienal du Lyon (France); and the 20th Sydney Biennial (Australia). His recent curatorial projects include the 41 Salón Nacional de Artistas (Cali) and the 7 Bienal do Mercosul (Porto Alegre). He has held teaching posts at the IDBA (Cali); the Universidad del Valle (Cali); the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá); and the EAV Parque Lage (Rio de Janeiro). Ortiz’s artworks are part of such important collections as the Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; CNAP Centre National des Arts Plastiques, France; Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt, Germany; Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, New York; Museo de Arte Moderno la Tertulia, Cali, Colombia; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France; and private collections in the U.S., Brazil, England, Colombia, and beyond. He lives and works in Bogotá. 

Ana María Reyes, is an Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Center for Latin American Studies and American and New England Studies at Boston University. She is also Affiliated Researcher, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, and founding member of the Symbolic Reparations Research Project. Her book The Politics of Taste: Beatriz González and Cold War Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2019) studies symbolic violence in the context of Cold War aesthetic and modernization discourses. She co-edited with Maureen Shanahan Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of a Cultural Icon  (University Press of Florida, 2016) on cultural bolivarianisms as a case for the arts and humanities in democratic thinking. She is currently working on a second monograph, To Weave and Repair: Symbolic Reparations in Colombia’s Peace Process. Reyes also serves as Director of Graduate Studies in Boston University’s Department of the History of Art and Architecture. She lives and works in Boston. 

María Wills Londoño is the Director of the Banco de la República Art Museums in Bogotá (including the Museo de Arte, the Museo Botero, and the Casa de Moneda). She is a curator, and her main projects relate to the instability of the contemporary image and the revision of official historical accounts in art. Her curatorial project The Life of Things (La vida de las cosas) led to her selection as curator of the 2019 MOMENTA Biennial of the Image in Canada. In this endeavor, she critiqued categories that define cultural objects as exotic or “non-Western,” as well as other aspects of creativity in the crisis of consumer society. With her essay “The Centenary of The Bauhaus: Of Conveniences and Connections” (El centenario de la Bauhaus: de conveniencias y conexiones), she won the Simón Bolívar Prize for Journalism in 2019. In that text, she addressed the relationships between the critical foundations of the Bauhaus, contemporary art, and handicrafts. Wills’s curatorial projects have been exhibited in such renowned institutions as the International Center of Photography, New York; the Jeu de Paume, Paris; the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris; the Photographers Gallery, London; the Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid (PHotoESPAÑA); the Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City; the Miguel Urrutia Art Museum of Banco de la República, Bogotá; the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art; and the Medellín Museum of Modern Art, among others. She lives and works in Bogotá.