Pablo Helguera: Distinguished Alumni Lecture

Pablo Helguera at Librería Donceles, San Francisco, 2014

Join us for a lecture by artist Pablo Helguera followed by an audience Q & A. 

Doors open at 5:45 p.m. Free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Explore the Visiting Artists Program homepage for visitor information, recordings of past events, and more.

Pablo Helguera (BFA 1993) is a New York–based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, socially engaged art, and performance. Helguera’s work focuses on 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.

His musical composition “Endingness” has been performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Helguera has exhibited or performed at venues such as the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the 8th and 11th Havana Biennials; PERFORMA, New York; Manifesta 11, Zurich; Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires; and many others. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of grants from Creative Capital, Art Matters, and Franklin Furnace. In 2011, he was named winner of the International Award for Participatory Art of the Region Emilia-Romagna in Italy. Helguera has worked since 1991 in a variety of contemporary art museums, including as head of public programs at the education department of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1998–2005) and as director of adult and academic programs at MoMA, New York (2007–20). 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 the curator of the exhibition Collection in Conversation with Pablo Helguera at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on view August 2, 2025–July 5, 2026. He is the author of many books, including Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011), The Parable Conference (2014), and A Journal of the Year of the Pharmacy (2021). He writes a weekly column titled Beautiful Eccentrics.

Presented in partnership with SAIC Alumni Engagement

This event will be live captioned by Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) services. The auditorium is wheelchair accessible and hearing assisted devices are available. For additional access requests, visit saic.edu/access.