Claudio Perna: The Son of the Immigrant
Beginning with the Autocurriculum, this essay examines Claudio Perna’s conceptual fixation on the fluid boundaries between documentation, artistic expression, and self-representation.
Silvia Benedetti
Silvia Benedetti is a Venezuelan New York-based art historian, curator, and writer. Her research focuses on opportunities to critically reassess and contextualize the work of peripheral creators in a global ambit as well as the intersection of artistic and social practices. Her research on the Venezuelan conceptual artist “Claudio Perna, ca. 1970: The Impossibility of Wholeness” establishes the first comprehensive analysis of the artist’s work. Other important artists in her research have been the German-born Venezuelan artist Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt) and the German artist Franz Erhard Walther.
Until recently she was the Manager of Exhibitions and Collection at the Bronx Museum of the Arts overseeing the Curatorial Department. Some of her previous work experience includes curatorial and research positions at the Cisneros Latin American Art Initiative in the Art and Art History Department at Hunter College and Dia Art Foundation in New York, and Fundación Gego in Caracas. She was Assistant Curator for the exhibition Boundless Reality: Traveler Artists’ Landscapes of Latin America from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection at Hunter College and the Americas Society (2015). Her writings have appeared in museum catalogs and publications such as Hyperallergic, BOMB Magazine, FLORÆ, Americas Quarterly. In 2010 she cofounded Docomomo Venezuela, a non-profit organization dedicated to the documentation and conservation of buildings, sites, and neighborhoods of the modern movement.
She holds an MA in Art History and Advanced Certificate in Curatorial Studies from Hunter College, French language and civilization from La Sorbonne in Paris, and Journalism from Universidad Monteávila in Caracas.