Milagros Maldonado
Milagros de las Mercedes Maldonado Blaubach is a cultural promoter, gallery owner, art advisor, visual art collector, and curator. She was the founder and president of the La Previsora Foundation, as well as its associated art gallery and movie theatre. She founded and is the current president of the non-profit organization META Miami.
Early years
Milagros de las Mercedes Maldonado Blaubach was born on July 9, 1944, in Valencia, Carabobo, Venezuela. She is the daughter of Elsa Blaubach and lawyer, cattle rancher, and businessman, Iván Darío Maldonado.Her paternal grandfather, Samuel Darío Maldonado, was a figure in Venezuelan politics, medicine, literature, and journalism. His character and views on life influenced Milagros' professional career by guiding her first steps in literature and fine arts.
Career
After completing her early studies in her hometown of Valencia, Blaubach moved to the United States, where she studied art at Saint Mary’s of Notre Dame High School in Indiana.She returned to Venezuela and began her higher education at the University of Carabobo, studying art history and painting.
In 1969, she moved to Italy and completed a degree in Art History, graduating summa cum laude from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma.
She began attending the Venice Biennale in 1972. At the same time, she began work as a co-producer of exhibitions, art installations, concerts, and dance-theater shows at L'Attico, the avant-garde gallery led by Fabio Sargentini in Rome. Between 1972 and 1974, she worked as the coordinator of the performance, music, and dance sections at the Great Contemporary Exhibition in Rome''.''
Work in Venezuela
After establishing herself in Rome, Blaubach returned to Caracas in 1975.She was hired as an assistant to Luis García Morales, the president of CONAC, which allowed her to become involved in all management areas. In 1977, she became assistant to Gonzalo Castellano, the general director of the Museum of Fine Arts, responsible for coordinating programming and exhibitions. Blaubach's management consisted in transforming, in association with the National Cinematheque, the La Previsora Movie Theater into an art film space dedicated to the screening of national and international films, art-independent and commercial cinema. In 2000, the theatre received the Municipal Award for Cinematographic Diffusion as the best movie theatre in the city.
By 1986, the Maldonado family, located in Caracas, was the majority shareholder of Seguros La Previsora. The La Previsora Art Gallery, created under the responsibility of Blaubach, constituted a new space for exhibitions of national and international artists. Blaubach served as the programmer, producer, and curator of the Gallery's shows until she left the position in 2009.
Exhibitions in Venezuela
Figuration/Fabulation (1990/2004)
On the 75th anniversary of the La Previsora insurance company, the La Previsora Foundation organised the exhibition Figuration/Fabulation: 75 Years of Painting in Latin America, with the participation of more than 100 Latin American artists in the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas. Artists included Rufino Tamayo—who was featured on the cover of the catalog—Antonio Segui, Antonio Henrique Amaral, Julio Galán, Mario Abreu, Candido Portinari, Armando Reverón, Luis Caballero, Fernando Botero, Mario Carreño, Oswaldo Guayasamín, José Gamarra, Flavio de Carvalho, Ana Mercedes Hoyos, María Izquierdo, Wifredo Lam, Amelia Pélaez, Anita Malfatti, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, Oswaldo Vigas, Jacobo Borges, Carlos Zerpa, and Roberto Matta. With the exhibition of the works, a booklet was also published with a prologue by acclaimed author Gabriel García Márquez and reflections on the pieces written by curator Roberto Guevara.Goya's ''Caprichos'' (2001)
The exhibition featured a series of Goya's original engravings, supported by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the European Union, and Cooperación Española.Carlos Cruz-Diez (1992/2006)
To commemorate the 78th anniversary of La Previsora, Milagros Maldonado commissioned the renowned international artist and kineticist Carlos Cruz-Diez to re-design the main door of the company's headquarters. This piece, called Cromoestructura, remains in the building and constitutes one of the exemplary contributions to integrating art in Venezuelan architecture. In 2006, the exhibition Cromosaturaciones y Cromo Interferencias was held, bringing together two emblematic works by the artist: a chromo-interference with moving projection and a chromo-saturation chamber.''The Sense of the Modern''—Leo Matiz (2007)
In addition to comprehensively covering the Mexican muralist movement and its protagonists, including Frida Kahlo, Leo Matiz's photography encompasses almost all of Latin America's scenarios and characters. This exhibition, curated by José Antonio Navarrete, focused on the beginning of modernity in architecture in Latin America, with examples including the Universidad Central de Venezuela, a world cultural heritage site.''Walter Arp… Rara Avis'' (2008)
This exhibition reviewed the body of work on Venezuelan birds developed by the painter and ecologist Walter Arp for over fifty years. Milagros Maldonado was the leading promoter of this event due to her admiration and respect for the artist's ornithological research and its scarce diffusion until then. The exhibition included more than sixty paintings that were exhibited along with photographs, interactive applications, and videos that reflected the vast number of Venezuelan birds, and their respective behaviours and physiognomy. The exhibition was accompanied by a publication about the life and work of Walter Arp by his curator Sergio Antillano Armas, with a prologue by the Venezuelan poet Eugenio Montejo.''Pancho Quilici: Tras Caracas'' (2009)
The Tras Caracas exhibition consisted of more than fifty paintings, installations, and videos in the spaces of La Previsora Art Gallery. In it, the painter Pancho Quilici presented work informed by research with photos, documents, and plans of the city of Caracas that the exhibition curators provided. In a city that, at the time, was experiencing the concerns of urban growth, Milagros Maldonado proposed dialogue with the artist to generate a meeting point for perception and reflection on Caracas. Quilici combined his memories of the capital with a vision of nostalgia and a certain futurism, with forms including incomplete buildings, labyrinths, and semi-transparent geometric forms.Work in Miami
By the time Maldonado left La Previsora Foundation in 2009, she had assembled an extensive art collection that included artists such as Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Fernando Botero, Antonio Seguí, José Gamarra, Luis Caballero, Ramón Alejandro, Gerardo Chávez, Agustín Cárdenas, Pancho Quilici, Armando Morales, and Jacobo Borges, and Armando Reverón. This collection inspired the exhibition, Beyond the Erotic, curated by José Antonio Navarrete, which included a series of lectures and educational activities.Upon moving to Miami and gaining experience in New York with exhibitions in alternative art galleries, she founded a new cultural space in Wynwood, motivated by the artistic boom that this part of the city was experiencing.
Miami Biennale / Maldonado Education through Art (META Miami)
Maldonado started working at Miami Biennale in 2010 and continued for eight years, during which she curated and produced numerous exhibitions, as well as musical and educational events.This nonprofit organisation manages multicultural projects, including national and international art exhibitions, musical presentations, lectures, film screenings, book presentations, and workshops of different types, as well as fairs and festivals related to the main objective of the organisation, which is to promote creative dialogue between Miami, its diverse cultural communities, and the rest of the world.
Film career
In 1986, Milagros Maldonado starred in a film version of Doña Bárbara by Rómulo Gallegos. The filming occurred on Hato El Frio's family ranch, but was unfinished due to a conflict between the leading actor and the producers.The director Diego Rísquez cast Milagros Maldonado to play La Malinche, the Nahua woman who collaborated with Hernán Cortés in the conquest of Mexico, in his 1988 film Amerika, Terra Incognita.
During her tenure as director of La Previsora Art Gallery, Milagros Maldonado promoted the making of several documentaries: La Vida en Color de Carlos Cruz Diez in co-production with Bolívar Films; Leo Matiz, El Sentido de lo Moderno, with the collaboration of Cuban photography curator and critic José Antonio Navarrete; and to accompany the 2008 Walter Arp exhibition, the Foundation collaborated with the television network Vale TV to create a documentary about the artist's essential research on Venezuelan birds.