María Isabel Rueda
Curator and artist 1972, Colombia; based in Puerto Colombia
Born in Cartagena de Indias, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, María Isabel Rueda currently lives in Puerto Colombia, a coastal town in the same region. This environment has shaped her practice over the last decade, anchoring it in the area’s particular context. Active as an artist since the late 1990s, Rueda has been a key figure in Colombia’s contemporary art scene. In the latter half of the 2010s, she was part of the now-defunct space El Bodegón and co-directed the independent project La Usurpadora in Puerto Colombia — an artist residency and curatorial platform with both local and international reach — through which she curated Háganlo mientras sean jóvenes for the Artecámara section of the Bogotá International Art Fair ARTBO in 2017.
In 2019, she joined the artistic team of the 45th Salón Nacional de Artistas with the curatorial project Universos Desdoblados at the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá, and served as artistic advisor for the 2022 Venice Biennale (The Milk of Dreams). In 2024, together with Catalina Vargas, she curated Acuerdos con el mundo natural y la asamblea de los seres vivos in Fragmentos, Espacio de Arte y Memoria in Bogotá. In 2021, along Eliana Hernández, she received Colombia’s National Poetry Prize for La mata, a book in which nature speaks as both voice and witness. She is the editor of the magazine Tropical Goth and, in 2017, curated the exhibition Gótico Tropical. Variaciones de la luz en otras dimensiones, as part of the France-Colombia year. She currently works in Barranquilla, alongside Julián Chams and Juan Betancourt, at La Casa de Meira, a center for artistic experimentation on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.
