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Malba announces the appointment of Gabriela Rangel (Caracas, 1963) as the museum's new Artistic Director. A specialist in Latin American art and an internationally prestigious curator, Rangel will be responsible for expanding the range and comprehensiveness of the Malba Collection; as well as for the development of the program of temporary exhibitions, in dialogue with the museum's interdisciplinary advisory team, composed of Eduardo F. Costantini Leandro Chiappa, Victoria Giraudo, and Guadalupe Requena. 

She will also be entrusted with the coordination and supervision of the programs in Publications, Education and Art and Thought, and the link-up of the departments of Film and Literature, which Fernando Martin Peña and Maria Soledad Costantini lead.  

For the past 15 years Gabriela Rangel has worked as Director of Visual Arts and Curator in Chief of Americas Society (2004 - 2019), a central institution for Latin American art in New York and a meeting place for the main players in the regional and international art scenes. In that time Rangel cultivated a wide network of relations with international museums, curators, artists, and academics. She was in charge of over 35 exhibition projects, and edited publications by artists and thinkers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Victoria Cabezas, Lydia Cabrera, Consuelo Castañeda, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Milagros de la Torre, Facundo de Zuviría, Dias & Riedweg, Juan Downey, Gego, Édouard Glissant, Silvia Gruner, Arturo Herrera, Kati Horna, Alexander von Humboldt, Marc Latamie, José Leonilson, Antonio Manuel, Erick Meyenberg, Marta Minujín, Priscilla Monge and Xul Solar, among others.

Eduardo F. Costantini, Founder and President of Malba, says of the appointment: “After an exhaustive new search over nearly a year, we have chosen Gabriela Rangel, a professional with a huge capability and institutional experience, with specialization in visual arts, film and literatures, the three pillars of Malba. After 20 years of living in New York, a crucial city for the art scene, Gabriela will also be able to contribute to her labor a privileged network of institutional and personal relations. On a personal level, Malba will also be a new approach to her native Venezuela, for our Latin American identity and idiosyncrasy,” he points out. 

As part of her role, Rangel will also have the task of developing collaborations with other local and international institutions and of implementing the strategies and tools for strengthening Malba's profile as a leader in Latin American art, in close collaboration with the Board de Directors and the Artistic Committee, which currently comprises Gonzalo Aguilar (UBA-Unsam/ Conicet), Andrea Giunta (UBA/ Conicet), Adriano Pedrosa (MASP, Brazil), Julieta González (Jumex, Mexico), Octavio Zaya (freelance curator), and Victoria Giraudo (Malba).

In Gabriela Rangel's words, "Malba is a fundamental space for establishing a cosmopolitan South-North dialogue. I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the artistic direction of a museum which is attaining its age of majority with very concrete successes and a promising look toward the future. It strikes me that articulating a Latin American mission out of the opacity of this moment in history requires modulating many different gestures which connect with problems that transcend identity, genders, genres, and borders either real or imaginary. Latin American art is a broken vessel whose pieces we glue together in order to give it back its lost form. Yet the fragments don't make it less interesting or valuable, just more complex."

Eighteen years after the founding of Malba, Gabriela Rangel's entry marks the beginning of a new phase, after the directorships of Agustín Arteaga (2001-2002), Marcelo Pacheco (2003-2013), and Agustín Pérez Rubio (2014-2018).

After the announcement, Gabriela Rangel will set about working with the Malba team on the museum's general programming, and from September 1 will be installed full time in Buenos Aires.