aquí estamos y aquí seguiremos / here we are and here we will be

EXHIBITION CURATOR BIO
Juan Carlos Rodríguez Rivera is a cuir boricua visual communicator and educator, passionate about food, lover of ephemeral objects, gradients and anything with glitter. Juan Carlos was born and raised in Cataño, the smallest town of Puerto Rico, but relocated to San Francisco, California in 2017. Juan Carlos combines anticolonial community-based knowledge exchange with site-specific installations and graphic design to create visual narratives that honor ancestral practices, decenter eurocentric perspectives and propose new autonomous futures. Juan Carlos es un diseñador y profesor, apasionado de la comida, amante de los objetos efímeros, y cualquier cosa con escarcha. Juan Carlos nació y creció en Cataño, el pueblo más pequeño de Puerto Rico pero se mudo a San Francisco, California en el 2017. Juan Carlos combina el intercambio de conocimiento comunitario y anticolonial con instalaciones “site-specific” y diseño gráfico para crear narrativas que honran las prácticas ancestrales, descentralizar lo eurocéntrico y proponer futures nuevo y autónomos.

PANEL GUEST CURATOR BIO
Natalia Viera Salgado is a Puerto Rican independent curator and curatorial consultant based in New York City and Puerto Rico and currently the Curatorial Resident at the Abrons Arts Center, NYC. She is also the co-founder of: Pública Espacio Cultural, an independent art space in Alto del Cabro, Santurce Puerto Rico. Her art historical research focuses on contemporary art concerning decolonial practices, architecture, social and environmental justice, and new media with a keen interest in hybrid and interdisciplinary projects. She has worked at the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture for the 4th Poly/Graphic Triennial Latin America and the Caribbean, collaborated with design studio División de Diseño(Puerto Rico), worked at El Museo del Barrio (New York, NY), Art in General (Brooklyn, New York), Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, New York) and The Nathan Cummings Foundation (New York) among other institutions. Viera is a founding member of Colectivo se habla español, a collective working on artistic and social projects that expand the limits of language while addressing migration, identity, human rights, and memory.