Join us on February 6, 2026, at 6pm for a conversation between artist Ariel Orozco and Yuneikys Villalonga, the Director of Curatorial Programs at the Coral Gables Museum. Please note that the conversation will be held in Spanish.
Ariel Orozco
Ariel Orozco (*1979 Sanctus Spiritus, CU) received his MFA from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana in 2005. His work has been shown at galleries, museums, and art fairs worldwide and is included in such collections as Colección Jumex, the Zabludowizc Collection, and the Museo de Arte Moderno, México. Working within a diverse array of mediums, Ariel Orozco moves seamlessly between performance, painting and installation in his conceptually driven practice. Often taking the form of interventions or actions, his work reflects on those overlooked interactions of everyday life by providing a new or alternative perspective on the seemingly mundane. Encompassing the deeply personal to the completely public, he nevertheless imbues his work with a compassion that is universal. Always seeking to give his audience an awareness of the people and things that surround us, his artwork provides moments of contemplation to reflect on the vagaries and marvels of life. Deeply symbolic and startlingly simple, Orozco’s work speaks a universal language accessible to all.
Yuneikys Villalonga
Yuneikys Villalonga graduated from Art History at the University of Havana, Cuba (2000) and went on to work as curator, both as a freelancer and with different organizations, including the British Council of Cuba, for the next ten years. Between 2000 and 2004, she taught Contemporary Caribbean Art at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA). Villalonga is the recipient of the National Curatorship Award 2004, from the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC). In 2010 she relocated to the US with her family. A year later, she joined Lehman College Art Gallery in New York, US, where she worked as Curator for the next five years. In 2016, she moved to Miami, Florida to serve as Associate Director of Exhibitions and Education at the Bakehouse Art Complex in Miami, for the following year. Since 2018, Villalonga has been the Director of Curatorial Programs at the Coral Gables Museum in Miami, Florida. During her time at the Museum, she has helped organize over 50 exhibitions of different sizes and scope, including: “For Now: Contemporary Venezuelan Art of the Miami Diaspora” (2019-2020); “A Matter of Time; Examining Forty Years of AIDS While Living through a Pandemic” (2021); “Alien Nations 2020” (2020-2021); “Julio Larraz: The Kingdom We Carry Inside” (2021-2022); “Painting with Bronze; The Work of Freda Coffing Tschumy” (2022) and “Masters that Changed the City; A Tribute to Jesús Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz Diez on Their Centennial” (2023); “Paving Roads for Latin American Art: The Pioneering Work of Celia Birbragher” (2023); “Jorge Tacla: A Memoir of Ruins” (2024); and “Coral Gables Fire: A Century of Service”, currently on view among others. Starting the Summer of 2025, she will start teaching art history at Florida International University.
