DENVER’S BIENNIAL OF THE AMERICAS FACES CUTBACKS

According to a recent article in the Denver Post via Artnet, plans for Denver’s Biennial of the Americas remain ambitious, despite the fact that the organization is still scrambling to raise some $3.5 million in capital from private donors (with $2 million in seed money originally given by the Boettcher Foundation). The festival had originally been set to have a seven-week run, but had to be scaled back. Also, its focus on contemporary art has been considerably softened, with organizers now pitching it more as a “hemis-fair,” a mix of political meet-up and world’s fair, centering on panels featuring political luminaries, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, and former Latin American leaders like Vicente Fox, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Alejandro Toledo.

The event does still include some fine art content. Mexican curator Paola Santoscoy, a 2009 graduate of visual and critical studies at the California College of the Arts and former associate curator at the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, was hired in January to put together the contemporary art programming—a staggeringly short time frame in which to organize a major show. Her exhibition, dubbed “The Nature of Things/La Naturaleza de las Cosas,” focuses on four categories mandated by the organizers: innovation, sustainability, community, and arts. Artists so far selected include Brigida Baltar, Santiago Cucullu, Jeronimo Hagerman, and Gabriel Acevedo Velarde.