A new chapter for MAMM: Marielsa Castro Vizcarra takes on the role of new chief curator

Starting Tuesday, June 3, Marielsa Castro Vizcarra joins as chief curator of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín. Her arrival marks the beginning of a new chapter for the museum, reaffirming the commitment to a critical, situated curatorial practice in dialogue with the social and cultural transformations of the Latin American territory.

• • Curator and researcher with an outstanding career at contemporary art institutions in Colombia, Mexico, and the United States.
  • She has worked on mediation and community pedagogy initiatives, such as Museos en común at Museo Jumex, aimed at strengthening the bonds between art and everyday life.
  • She arrives at the MAMM with the purpose of enhancing the museum’s role as a space for thought, dialogue, and artistic experimentation in Latin America.

A curatorship for imagining the museum

Marielsa Castro Vizcarra is a Mexican curator and researcher. Her professional practice has focused on creating spaces for encounter between contemporary art, critical education, and communities. Between 2021 and 2025, she served as associate curator at the Museo Jumex (Mexico City), where she developed Museos en común, a program of critical pedagogies that brought together curators, artists, mediators, and collectives to imagine new ways of inhabiting the museum through collaboration, care, and listening.

As a curator at Jumex, she worked on multiple exhibitions, among which Minerva Cuevas: Game Over (2022), Amalia Pica: ¡Qué viva el papeleo! (2023), and Siluetas sobre Maleza (2024) stand out. In 2022, she was co-curator of the exhibition Rodrigo Hernández. El espejo, a collaboration between the Museo Jumex and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, which explored philosophical and poetic references through the visual language of the Mexican artist, and which marked a first institutional crossover between Marielsa and the MAMM.

Between 2016 and 2019, she worked as head of the public services and education area at the Arts and Other Collections Unit of the Banco de la República in Bogotá, where she led processes of cultural mediation, audience development, and museum pedagogy. This experience deepened her vision of curatorship as a public and situated practice, oriented toward encounter, listening, and collaborative work with diverse communities.

She is also an associate of coopia, a cooperative experiment between Colombia and Mexico committed to doing through inhabiting and learning toward the socio-environmental transformation of territory. These experiences have not only highlighted relevant aesthetic contributions but have also opened conversations about the body, memory, territory, affect, and resistance.

Her approach starts from curatorship as a situated tool of mediation, interweaving the sensory with the political, and advocating for collective forms of thought and creation. In her role as chief curator of the MAMM, Marielsa will seek to strengthen the museum’s open and participatory vocation, fostering closer and more horizontal connections with artists, audiences, and communities, from Medellín toward Latin America.