Milagros Maldonado

Milagros de las Mercedes Maldonado Blaubach (born July 9, 1944) is a cultural promoter, gallery owner, art advisor, visual art collector, and curator. She was the vice-president of the La Previsora Foundation, where she oversaw its associated art gallery and movie theatre. She is the founder and current president of the non-profit organization META Miami.

Early years Maldonado was born on July 9, 1944, in Valencia, Carabobo, Venezuela, to Elsa Blaubach Horrocks and Iván Darío Maldonado. Her father was a lawyer and businessman, while her paternal grandfather, Samuel Darío Maldonado, was a physician and writer active in Venezuelan public life. Maldonado has identified her family's background in literature and the arts as a primary influence on her career in cultural promotion.

Career After completing her early studies in Valencia, Blaubach moved to the United States, where she studied art at Saint Mary’s of Notre Dame High School in Indiana. In 1969, she moved to Italy and graduated summa cum laude in art history from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma.

In 1972, she joined the Venice Biennale; around the same time, she began working as a co-producer of exhibitions, art installations, concerts, and dance-theatre shows at L'Attico, an avant-garde gallery in Rome led by Fabio Sargentini. Between 1972 and 1974, she served as the coordinator of the performance, music, and dance sections of the Great Contemporary Exhibition in Rome. In 1977, she became assistant to Gonzalo Castellano, the general director of the Museo de Bellas Artes, where she was responsible for coordinating programming and exhibitions. 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 Maldonado, constituted a new space for exhibitions of national and international artists. Maldonado served as the programmer, producer, and curator of the Gallery's shows until she left the position in 2009. 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. A booklet was published to accompany the exhibition with a prologue by author Gabriel García Márquez and reflections on the works 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 artist and kineticist Carlos Cruz-Diez to redesign the main door of the company's headquarters. This piece, called Cromoestructura, remains in the building, thus integrating art into 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 covering the Mexican muralist movement and its protagonists, including Frida Kahlo, Leo Matiz's photography encompasses many of Latin America's scenarios and characters. Milagros Maldonado was the leading promoter of this event due to her admiration and respect for the artist's ornithological research, which was not well known. 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, their respective behaviors, 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. At the time, Caracas was experiencing the concerns of urban growth, and 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 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 (2010), curated by José Antonio Navarrete, which included a series of lectures and educational activities.

After moving to Miami and having gained experience in New York with exhibitions in alternative art galleries, she founded a new cultural space in Wynwood, which was motivated by the artistic boom that 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.

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 (2005) in co-production with Bolívar Films; Leo Matiz, El Sentido de lo Moderno (2007), 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 research on Venezuelan birds.