Cultural Producer, Organizer & Curator
Libertad O. Guerra, Executive Director of the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center!
Urban anthropologist, curator, and cultural organizer / producer with 15 years of experience in arts management and non-profit executive role. Her academic research and symposia has focused on Puerto Rican, Latinx, and NYC’s social-artistic movements and cultural activism in im/migrant urban settings. As an arts administrator she is Director / Chief Curator of the new Loisaida Center where she produced critically- and community-acclaimed exhibitions; a roster of distinctive programs and forum series; a downtown platform / incubation space for Latinx cultural producers and educators; and revitalized the historical Loisaida Street Festival.
She was a founding member and director of ‘Spanic Attack, a New York City based arts-collective anchored in a Latinx and Caribbean sensibility (2003-2009). Under her leadership, the collective organized exhibitions, panels, publications, festivals and live events in New York City, San Juan (Puerto Rico), Lima (Perú), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), and Berlin (Germany).
More recently she led the community engagement process and study leading to the Loisaida Cultural Plan policy advocacy document, and got mentioned in the New York Times list of 10 Galleries to Visit Now on the Lower East Side. Her most recent exhibits include Pasado y Presente: Art After the Young Lords (Spring 2019), Activists Estates: A Radical History of Property in Loisaida (Fall 2019), and got awarded the Lower East Side Community Hero Award (2019).
Guerra is a longtime resident of Mott Haven in the South Bronx, where she co-founded the environmental justice coalition South Bronx Unite (SBU) in 2012, which was bestowed the Design Trust’s Public for All Prize in 2017. As part of the board of the Mott Haven/Port Morris Land Stewarts, Guerra has collaborated in community based participatory research along with multiple academic partners, and participated in extensive local, citywide and national coalition building efforts on themes of environmental racism, and advocacy for community land trusts and cultural equity. Her publications include essays in The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, the edited volume New York-Berlin: Kulturen in der Stadt, and in FIELD: a Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism.
She is currently a Ford Foundation 2020-21 grantee for the JustXChanges initiative, and a recipient of the DeVos Institute Global Arts Management Fellowship (2019-2021). She is part of the Art Against Austerity working group with Social Practice Queens, served as adviser for one of the Design Trust’s Public for All initiatives, is a member of the Naturally Occurring Cultural District network (NOCD-NY), and serves as Executive Director of The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Education Center (The Clemente) in the Lower East Side.