NEW YORK, NY.- Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Director of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) announce the appointment of Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy as Curator of Contemporary Art. Starting in January 2011, she will join the CPPC’s team at its New York headquarters where she will be responsible for collection growth, exhibitions, grants, and other projects related to the institution’s mission to enhance appreciation of the diversity, sophistication, and range of art from Latin America.

According to Mr. Pérez-Barreiro,“The addition of Sofia Hernández to the CPPC marks an important moment in our commitment to contemporary Latin American art. She brings a deep understanding of global contemporary art and extensive experience in working closely with artists.”

Sofia Hernández Chong Cuy comes to the CPPC from the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City where she was Director since 2009. Originally from Mexico, she graduated from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in 2000. As a curator of contemporary art she has worked closely with visual artists, often conceptualizing meeting points, in the form and space of exhibitions, events or printed matter, for audiences to experience art in unconventional ways.

In the past decade, she has worked at Art in General, Americas Society and CCS Bard, all in New York; curated exhibitions for Kadist Art Foundation in Paris, the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA), and the Center for Contemporary Art in Vilnius, Lithuania; and worked closely on projects with a number of artists, including Allora & Calzadilla, Alejandro Cesarco, Mario García Torres, Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, and Judi Werthein.

Sofía Hernández lectures regularly on contemporary art, and publishes frequently in exhibition catalogs, art magazines and in her blog Sideshows.org. She is a board member of Kunstverein, Amsterdam, and an agent of Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany.

The Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), founded in the 1970s by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and Gustavo A. Cisneros, is one of the core cultural and educational initiatives of the Fundación Cisneros. Based in New York City and Caracas, the CPPC’s mission is to enhance appreciation of the diversity, sophistication, and range of art from Latin America. Additionally, it works to advance scholarship of Latin American art, promote excellence in visual-arts education, and encourage a high level of expertise among Latin American art professionals.

It achieves these goals through the preservation, presentation, and study of the material culture of the Ibero-American world—from modern and contemporary art to colonial and federalist furniture—as well as the material evidence of Latin America’s indigenous peoples. CPPC activities include exhibitions, publications, grants for scholarly research and artistic production, and the internationally-recognized education initiative Piensa en arte\Think Art.