Biography:

Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy (She/Her) is a New York-based curator, writer, art historian, and arts and grants administrator. Her practice advocates for underrepresented communities, stories, materials, and approaches in the art world. Her research investigates the “aesthetics of optimism,” the subversive power of humor, cuteness, and leisure as tools of protest. She is the Director of the New York City Department of Transportation Art (NYC DOT Art). Vizcarrondo-Laboy also served as Assistant Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD,) NY, where from 2016 to 2022, she was part of MAD’s curatorial team, helping organize over twenty exhibitions and projects. During her time there, she also led MAD’s Burke Prize, a prestigious contemporary craft award.

Recent projects include co-curating The Future of Clay at the Clay Studio, Philly, and co-curating R & Company’s landmark Objects: US 2024 triennial and its accompanying catalogue featuring 55 makers working in the ever-blurring fields of design, art, and craft within an innovative fluid spectrum of “Seven Archetypes of Objecthood.” She also penned an essay on Japanese ceramicist Shinichi Sawada for the Shinichi Sawada: Agents of Clay exhibition catalogue, organized Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and The Mint Museum, NC. In 2024 she was named a “Thinker” within Apollo Magazine’s 40 Under 40 in Craft list. Vizcarrondo-Laboy’s newest publication, New Women’s Work: Reimagining “Feminine” Craft in Contemporary Art with Smith Street Books, celebrating this history and legacy through profiles on 38 women and nonbinary artists, is out October 1, 2024.

She presented the critically acclaimed Funk You Too! Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture at MAD in 2023, which brought together over 50 historical and contemporary works to contextualize today’s ceramic practice within the legacy of West Coast Funk ceramics and their makers, particularly their use of humor for critique and personal expression. The accompanying catalogue is a finalist for the American Ceramic Circle 2024 Book Award. That year she also co-curated Barro Barrio at GGLA, LA, bringing together 25 LA-based artists working in clay for a celebration of community and the rich history and presence of the medium in this bustling city, and curated In Good Taste, a solo show of Lindsey “Lou” Howard’s ceramics at albertz benda, LA.

In 2022 she curated The Universe Within at Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, an exhibition celebrating the interiority and multifacetedness of women and nonbinary artists of the Black diaspora, Belonging: 2022 NCECA Annual at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, to investigate how belonging is defined, established, and maintained in the United States and an exhibition in collaboration with The Color Network at Grounds For Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ, titled Fragile: Earth, exploring different perspectives on fragility. She juried the annual Hawai’i Craftsmen exhibition and curated Out of Office, an open-call exhibition investigating the relationship between leisure and work for Collar Works, Troy, NY, in 2021.

She also co-created and co-hosts the podcast Clay in Color with artist Alex Anderson, which highlights the voices of some of the most exciting established and emerging artists of color working in ceramics. In 2020, Vizcarrondo-Laboy curated Clay Is Just Thick Paint, an exhibition of Jennifer Rochlin’s ceramics for the Jane Hartsook Gallery, NY. She also curated Sleight of Hand, which brought together the work of six contemporary artists of color using humor in ceramics as a powerful tool of resistance, resilience, and healing, for the Center for Craft, Asheville, NC, where she was a 2020 Curatorial Fellow.

She is one of the inaugural recipients of the Cultured Magazine x Parker Pen Writer’s Grant, for which she penned Seriously Cute: Six Artists Harnessing the Power Dichotomy of Cuteness, which was reprinted in White Chapel Gallery’s Documents of Contemporary Art: The Cute edited by Sianne Ngai. She was the first mentor for The Color Network and Artaxis Curatorial Fellowship, and her essay on Aline Berdichevsky’s and Julia Turner’s jewelry relating to the US-Mexico border and the plight of Latinx immigrants was published in MAD’s Jewelry Stories: Highlights from the Collection 1947–2019. She has also been published in the Journal of Modern Craft and American Craft Magazine and multiple exhibition catalogs.

She holds a BA in Art History from the University of Florida with minors in Anthropology and Ceramics and an MA from the Bard Graduate Center, New York, in Decorative Arts, Design History, & Material Culture. Vizcarrondo-Laboy was born and raised in Puerto Rico.

Recent Publications: