Miguel Braceli - The Bronx Museum

Biography

Miguel Braceli holds an MSc degree in Architecture from the Central University of Venezuela and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Arts. Most of his works have been large-scale projects developed in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. He has led art education projects with institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York), Washington Projects for the Arts (Washington, DC), and Matadero Madrid. His most recent recognitions include Fulbright Scholar (2018-2020), Sondheim Prize Finalist (USA, 2020), Future Architecture Fellow (EU, 2019), Young Artist Award of the Principality of Asturias (Spain, 2018). He is founder of LA ESCUELA___ together with the international foundation Siemens Stiftung.

Artist Statement

I work with participatory projects based on collective learning and making. They are site-specific works that bring together communities, schools, and organizations in the development of Proyectos Formativos (Formative Projects): community-based projects whose main medium is education. Addressing social-political issues, these projects happen in public space to create collective responses from, with and for specific communities.

Trained as an architect in Venezuela, my art practice emerged as a resilient response to our multiple crises. Later I understood how this practice is rooted in a long genealogy of Latin American artists and educators—who seek to bring education closer to real contexts, so as to learn and act on them. Through an interdisciplinary approach, my practice sits at the intersection between art and architecture; performance, media and installation; activism and education.

Within a larger artistic research, I am interested in the relationship between the body and the territory, between the individual being and the collective body, between order and contingency of open-ended projects in the expanded field. From vast geographies to more intimate connections on a human scale, many of my works explore notions of borders, migration, identity, human rights and geopolitical conflicts. They aim for equity as matter to build and strive to reconfigure that substance into meaningful social connections.