We were lucky to catch up with Katherine Chacon recently and have shared our conversation below.
Katherine, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
I believe that resilience comes from life itself. Life is not exactly a bed of roses, it has ups and downs, and the moments of crisis teach us the strength that is needed to face them, without losing optimism, but without losing our sense of reality either.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I am a curator, critic, and researcher in the visual arts. I am also a writer and an art book editor. In Venezuela, I had a career of almost 30 years in the visual arts. I started very young, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas where I eventually became Chief Curator of the Latin American Art Collection. Shortly after, I began a career as a cultural manager, being appointed Director of the Armando Reverón Museum. Later, I directed the Museum of Print and Design Carlos Cruz-Diez and then the Alejandro Otero Museum, both in Caracas. At the same time, I curated a number of Venezuelan and Latin American art exhibitions and researched and wrote quite a few art and critical texts. I have written several books, including “Art in the Venezuelan Landscape,” a comprehensive survey of landscape painting in Venezuela from the colonial days to the present, and “El Bolívar de Torano,” recently published.
I have met wonderful people from whom I have learned a lot, and my work has been fairly valued. Working in the art world has the extraordinary as a daily event, and that is meeting the artists and connecting with their thoughts and works. I arrived in Miami in 2016. At first, I felt a little afraid to re-start a life in a new country, with a different language and different cultural issues. However, I’m fortunate because I have had the opportunity to work in my field continuously. With all my experience, I developed my own company in Miami, Pan Paniscus Art Services, which objective is to provide professional services in all the areas related to visual art. It includes curatorships, writing of critical texts, translations, appraisals, collector advising, artists coaching, editing and publishing, teaching, artists’ social network and web pages managing and many more. One of the things I am most passionate about is artist coaching. I love guiding emerging artists not only to find their own voice, but to guide their careers in the best way within the art field, which has its own particularities. This work has given me great satisfactions.
My work as an art history teacher to groups of professionals from other areas, and in which I have been working for six years, has been equally gratifying, ss well as my activity as an exhibitions curator. But perhaps a task that has taken time to realize has been act as an editor of my first art book in the USA, which will come out in April of this year. It is a book that compiles the works of fifteen Latin American artists based in Miami and will be presented soon at the Coral Gables Museum. I have a group of very well-trained professionals working with me. All of us have an extensive experience in museums and proficiency in all these areas. I would like me and my company be known because of out high level of professionalism and experience in the art field. That makes excellence as a guide for all our work.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I believe that the fundamental thing in my profession has been the love for what I do. This allowed me to work hard out of genuine passion for what I did. I remember that when I was very young and I worked at the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas, I used to tell my mother that I could work there for free, such was the personal satisfaction that my work gave me. Then my first advice is related to loving what you do. Sometimes a person enters a career based on how profitable it can be, but if you don’t like that career, it is hard for you to become good at it and, worst of all, it will cause you great unhappiness. Therefore, love and passion for what you do is a priority.
Another skill that has been very useful to me has been to love excellence. I learned this at the Central University of Venezuela where I was trained, but above all during my formative years in Venezuelan museums, which came to have the highest standards in Latin America. So my second piece of advice is to have a sense of excellence and stick with it.
The third has to do with the conviction that one does not do anything alone, but depends on who surrounds you, supports you, and teaches you. In my career, the formation of good work teams has been essential. A team of professionally capable, passionate and, above all, good people. This is a guarantee of success for any company. So, that’s my third piece of advice: work together with good people, who have your same values, levels, expectations. A good team is worth gold.
Before we go, maybe you can tell us a bit about your parents and what you feel was the most impactful thing they did for you?
My father was a voracious reader, a lover of history and the arts, who instilled in all of his children the importance of knowledge. My mother was a very strong woman, with a somewhat ironic attachment to the earth, to reality, traits so characteristic of llaneros. They were both good people, honest and with a sense of justice. From both parents, I inherited the recognition of the transcendent meaning of life, a knowledge to differentiate the important from the fatuous. I must add that I owe my faith in God to my mother. It is a treasure of the soul.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.katherinechacon.com
- Instagram: @katherinechaconart
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chaconkatherine
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherine-chacon/
- Youtube: @katherinechacon3704
Image Credits
Manuela Delgado, Maria Alejandra Prado, Trina Oropeza, Imago Art in Action
