An arts dispatch from SundayFringe 🌎
Art has a habit of turning up in unexpected places. Sometimes in a grand museum, sometimes in a schoolroom, and occasionally in a suitcase.
Across the Atlantic this autumn, a lively collection of projects has been gathering momentum, from California’s museum celebrations to experimental exhibitions in Spain and new opportunities for young artists in Venezuela. Different cities, different stories, but a shared sense that art belongs wherever people have ideas worth exploring.
Long Beach, California: Thirty Years and Still Creating
The Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) has been celebrating its 30th anniversary, marking three decades of championing Latin American and Latino art.
Its October gala, 30 Years of Gratitude, recognised figures including actor Edward James Olmos, philanthropist Tanya Capriles de Brillembourg and Congressman Robert García, alongside the MIA Art Collection for its international partnership.
Beyond the celebrations lies a more interesting story about cultural endurance. Museums are not built through exhibitions alone. They grow through relationships, collectors, artists, educators and supporters who keep returning to the conversation.
Thirty years is quite a commitment to an idea. And in an artistic world often preoccupied with the next big thing, there’s something rather heartening about that.
Miami: The Many Shapes of Power
Over in Coral Gables, Miami, The Shapes of Power brought together artists from the MIFA residency programme at the University of Miami Gallery at The Chapel.
Curated by Shirley Moreira and featuring work by Andreína Fuentes Angarita, the October exhibition explored power in its many disguises: family relationships, spirituality, identity, personal experience and the larger social structures that influence everyday life.
Not all power announces itself with a grand gesture. Sometimes it lives in the arrangements of a household, the objects people keep, or the expectations quietly passed from one generation to another.
The exhibition’s theme offers an intriguing way of approaching art: not simply as something that represents the world, but as a means of noticing the forces that shape it.
Valencia, Spain: The Exhibition That Fits in a Suitcase
Now here’s a rather wonderful idea.
In Albalat de la Ribera, near Valencia, artist Andreína Fuentes Angarita opened Plan B: Ruda pero delicada on 31 October at Casa del Toro.
Developed through the Plan B residency programme with artist Rebeca Plana, the exhibition has been described as the exhibition that fits in a suitcase — a portable cabinet of curiosities, destined to travel with Fundació Caixa Castelló.
There’s something beautifully mischievous about the idea of an exhibition that can be packed away and carried somewhere else.
For centuries, cabinets of curiosities gathered unusual objects, natural specimens and fragments of distant worlds into intimate collections. Here, that tradition meets a contemporary fascination with mobility, scale and the changing relationship between artwork and audience.
The suitcase becomes more than a means of transport. It becomes part of the artistic proposition.
An exhibition no longer needs to be fixed permanently to a particular room. Its surroundings can change, its audience can change, and even the act of unpacking may become part of its meaning.
Art travelling light, but carrying plenty of possibilities.
Maracaibo, Venezuela: Creativity in the Classroom
Meanwhile, in Maracaibo, Arts Connection Foundation and Escolarte have launched an art-pedagogical residency inviting artist-educators to work with young people in local school communities.
The paid opportunity, accepting applications until 30 November, places artistic curiosity alongside education, creating space for young people to discover and develop their own creative possibilities.
There’s an important distinction between teaching someone how to reproduce an established image and helping them discover what they might want to express.
A classroom can become a studio, a meeting place or somewhere to experiment with unfamiliar materials and ideas.
Not every young person will become a professional artist, of course. But learning to observe, question, interpret and make something can travel far beyond the classroom.
Doral, Florida: Art, Empathy and Endangered Creatures
Back in Florida, the Doral International Art Fair runs from 12–15 November, with Arts Connection Foundation joining organisations including Sala Mendoza, Espacio Anna Frank, Coexistencia.org and MOLAA.
Among the events is the presentation of Fauna de la empatía, a book featuring 27 illustrations by artist Carlos Zerpa depicting endangered Venezuelan species.
It’s an appealing meeting of art and environmental awareness.
Scientific records can tell us how populations are declining, where habitats are disappearing and which species face increasing threats. Illustration offers another way of encountering those same creatures, allowing their shapes, colours and particular characteristics to become objects of attention.
An animal that might otherwise remain a name in a conservation report becomes something imagined, recognised and perhaps remembered.
The book is co-published by Espacio Anna Frank and Fundación La Compañía Humana, with sponsorship from Banesco Banco Universal.
And there’s another publication in the making. Unstoppable, celebrating 25 years of Andreína Fuentes Angarita’s career, is due for release in 2027. The book will feature a typeface developed from the artist’s own handwriting — a lovely detail that gives the printed page something of the artist’s physical presence.
Caracas: Seventy Years of Keeping Art Alive
Fundación Sala Mendoza is marking its 70th anniversary with an initiative called 70 Ambassadors of the Future.
Founded in 1956, the organisation has presented more than 500 exhibitions and supported over 1,000 artists. Its new campaign invites individuals and organisations to help sustain its next chapter, supporting exhibitions, workshops, awards and the development of its Documentation Center.
There’s a pleasing sense of continuity here.
An exhibition may last only a few weeks, but the work of preserving records, maintaining collections and supporting artists can stretch across generations.
Archives are full of futures as well as histories. A photograph, a letter, a catalogue or a forgotten sketch may eventually find its way into another artist’s work, perhaps decades after it was first made.
And so the creative conversation continues.
Art That Travels Further
From California to Miami, Valencia to Maracaibo, this little journey reveals something rather cheering about contemporary art.
It doesn’t always require monumental spaces or elaborate technology.
Sometimes it needs a museum willing to keep its doors open for thirty years. Sometimes it needs a teacher, a conservation-minded illustrator, or a suitcase full of curious objects.
What connects these projects is not a single artistic style, but the freedom to rethink where art happens, who participates and what ordinary materials might become.
A familiar object can carry the trace of a journey. A drawing can make a distant creature feel closer. A classroom can open onto an entirely new way of seeing.
And somewhere between these different places, fresh possibilities begin to emerge: exhibitions that travel in pockets, stories gathered from objects, small performances built from everyday gestures, or artworks that need little more than a listener’s imagination.
The world is already full of materials, encounters and unfinished stories. Sometimes the beginning of an artwork is simply the moment one of them catches our attention.
From SundayFringe — celebrating the people, places and ideas keeping creativity moving around the world.
Explore the projects: Arts Connection Foundation
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