Pablo Helguera is highly regarded in the field of socially engaged art as both practitioner and educator. Since 2007, he has served as director of adult and academic programs in the department of education at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His visual art incorporates pedagogy, social engagement, historical research and language. Past projects included a phonographic archive of dying languages, 14 visual artist "heteronyms," an alternative radio station in Italy, and an exhibition of four fictional opera composers. In 2006, as part of The School of Panamerican Unrest project, Helguera drove from Anchorage to Tierra del Fuego with a collapsible schoolhouse, organizing discussions, activist happenings and civic ceremonies along the way. He is the author of many books, including Manual of Contemporary Art Style (Jorge Pinto Books, 2007), an ironic, insightful and humorous look at the inner social workings of the contemporary art scene; and Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook (2011), now required reading in many graduate art programs. Helguera has received Creative Capital, Guggenheim, and Franklin Furnace Fellowships, and in 2011 he was the first recipient of the International Award for Participatory Art, given by the Assembly of Emiglia-Romagna in Italy.
Helguera served as an exhibitions panelist for the Center in 2012 and contributed to the Center's 2013 publication Pigeons on the Grass, Alas: Contemporary Curators Talk About the Field. In addition, he participated in a Center roundtable discussion in February 2011 with Eungie Joo, the current director of art and cultural programs at Instituto Inhotim in Brumadinho, Brazil, formerly the Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs at the New Museum, New York.
