The Central American Studies Lecture Series presents: Alma Ruiz

Alma Ruiz was born in Guatemala City, and is a renowned contemporary art curator in the City of Los Angeles. She is former senior curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles where she worked for over 30 years, and where she curated numerous exhibitions on the postwar period in the United States, Italy, and Latin America, and exhibited artists such as Lygia Clark, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Magdalena Fernández, Carlos Garaicoa, Ernesto Neto, Ana Mendieta, Hélio Oiticica, and Gabriel Orozco, among others. Throughout her time at MOCA she contributed to art exhibitions that reflected the cultural diversity of the city, and worked to include a Latin American perspective in exhibitions about global contemporary art. She introduced to the City of Los Angeles some of the most important Latin American artists exploring abstraction in sculpture and painting, as well as the use of light and technology in installations. In addition, she has served as a guest curator at the Fundación Jumex in Mexico City, the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C., and the Fowler Museum at UCLA in Los Angeles. She is a member of the Advisory Committee for the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami. When she announced her retirement last year, MOCA wrote on social media that "Alma's commitment to Latin American artists' positioned MOCA as an early leader in both collecting and exhibiting artists from the region and has made an indelible  and important mark on our history." She was recently appointed as the Center for Management in the Creative Industries Senior Fellow at Claremont  Graduate University, and curator of the 20th Bienal de Arte Paiz in Guatemala City, which will take place in June 2016.