College of Performing Arts Faculty

Profile

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art and performance. Helguera’s work incorporates pedagogy, sociology and theater and literary strategies. His project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest”, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between and covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record as well as a pioneering work of socially engaged art.

Helguera has worked since 1991 in a variety of contemporary art museums, most recently as head of public programs at the Education department of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1998-2005). From 2007 until his appointment at the New School, he was the Director of Adult and Academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has organized more than 1000 public events in conjunction with nearly 100 exhibitions. In 2010 he was appointed pedagogical curator of the 8th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which took place in September, 2011.

Helguera is a Guggenheim Fellow and has received the Creative Capital, Art Matters, Franklin Furnace and Blade of Grass fellowships, as well as the First International Award of Participatory Art from the Region Emilia Romagna (Bologna). He holds a PhD from Kingston University, London, and an honorary PhD from the Kansas Art Institute.

Pablo Helguera has exhibited and performed individually in many museums and biennials around the world. He is the author of several books including Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011), The Parable Conference (2014) and An Atlas of Commonplaces (2015)