Paco Barragán
Dr. Paco Barragán is an art historian, art theorist, and curator specializing in the history of art fairs and biennials. He has published among others with UCLA Press, Palgrave-McMillan, Kerber Verlag, SKIRA, and Charta. Between 2015 and 2017 he was the Head of Visual Arts of Cultural Arts Centre Matucana 100 in Santiago de Chile. Between 2006 and 2008 he was artistic director and curator respectively of the art fairs CIRCA Puerto Rico and PhotoMiami. In 2005 he was co-curator of the International Biennale of Contemporary Art (IBCA) in Prague and in 2016 he was co-curator of Toronto Nuit Blanche. He has curated 91 exhibitions. Some of the books he has authored are The Art to Come (Subastas Siglo XXI, 2002), The Art Fair Age (Charta, 2008), From Roman Feria to Global Art Fair, From Olympia Festival to Neo-liberal Biennial: On the ‘Biennialization’ of Art Fairs and the ‘Fairization’ of Biennials (Artpulse Editions, 2020). His essay “Neo-modernism, Neo-biennalism, Neo-fairism” appeared in the reader A History of the Western Art Market: A Sourcebook of Writings on Artists, Dealers, and Markets (2017), published by the University of California Press.