DLG327 Pablo Helguera's path to working as a socially engaged artist is as original, deep and wide as the work he's creating.

Dr. Lisa Gives a Sh*t

Pablo Helguera is an world-renown artist, performer, cartoonist, poet, writer, author of several books, advice columnist, The Estheticist, lecturer/educator, a professor at the New School, father, husband and he can sing and write songs!

To understand Pablo and his work, you really need to listen to this episode of how he has evolved into the artist he's become. Pablo was born in 1971 in Mexico City to a family of classical musicians. His brother, 9 years older, was a poet and a philosopher. Pablo describes how his day to day, his brother was teaching him, opening his mind and having him read all this heavy philosophy shit at a young age. So while you were playing Nintendo, he was reading Nietzsche.

All of this powerful and unusual education helped create a precocious young man. When Pablo was still in his twenties, he was awarded a Creative Capital Grant to realize his project: School of Panamerican Unrest. The core of the project consisted of a traveling schoolhouse which made 30 stops between the U.S. state of Alaska and Chile's Antártica Chilena province between May and September 2006, following the entire length of the Pan-American Highway.

Pablo's unlimited, curiosity, drive and generous desire to connect with so many disparate communities makes for an extremely compelling Dr. Lisa session like nothing I've ever heard. You can enjoy Pablo's latest project, Beautiful Eccentrics HERE.

Instagram: helguerapablo

Website: http://pablohelguera.net/

BIO:

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 focuses in a variety of topics ranging from history, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, ethnography, memory and the absurd, in formats that are widely varied including the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction.

His work as an educator has usually intersected his interest as an artist. This intersection is best exemplified in 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. Covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record as well as a pioneering work for the new generation of artworks regarded under the area of socially engaged art.

Pablo Helguera performed individually at the Museum of Modern Art /Gramercy Theater, in 2003, where he showed his work “Parallel Lives”. His musical composition, “Endingness” has been performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Helguera has exhibited or performed at venues internationally too many to name…His work has been reviewed in …. Art in America, Artforum, The New York Times, ArtNews, amongst others. In 2008 he was awarded too many to name

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 to 2020, he was Director of Adult and Academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has organized close to 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. He is currently Assistant Professor of Arts and Entrepreneurship at the College of Performing Arts at the New School in New York.

He is represented by Kent Fine Art in New York and Enrique Guerrero Gallery in Mexico City.

He is the author of many books, including Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011) and The Parable Conference (2014).

He writes a weekly column titled Beautiful Eccentrics.