Luis Romero

Courtesy the artist and Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

Luis Romero (b. 1967, Caracas, Venezuela) is a visual artist and curator with three decades of experience working in the Venezuelan cultural scene. He was a co-founder of the gallery Oficina #1 (Caracas, 2005-2015); director of La Llama Foundation - Artist Residency Program (Caracas, 2000-2004); editor of the contemporary art magazine Pulgar (1999-2010). Currently, he co-directs the multidisciplinary space Abra in Caracas.

As an artist, he has an extensive career that began in the 1990s, with numerous solo and group exhibitions, inside and outside Venezuela. His work is characterized by an iconographic and graphic language that takes form through various media and expanded techniques of drawing and painting. He has also curated numerous exhibitions and artistic events, and his work is included in public and private collections in Venezuela, the United States, the United Kingdom, Bolivia, Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, the Netherlands, and Lebanon.

A school without walls

LA ESCUELA___ began in 2021 with a reflection from its artistic director and co-founder, Miguel Braceli, about educational models for social practices and situated learning. This idea of bringing art and education closer to social realities by taking them out into public space became the building block of a project co-developed with the international foundation Siemens Stiftung. From this vision, LA ESCUELA___ was conceived as a “school without walls.”

Rather than operating from a fixed campus or following a predetermined curriculum, this artist-run platform works through a growing hemispheric network of artists, architects, educators, researchers, organizers, independent spaces, and communities. Its projects take shape in different contexts across the Americas, responding to local conditions while creating connections between places and practices.

Since 2022, LA ESCUELA___ has developed more than 45 projects in 13 countries, engaging more than 6,000 participants in online and on-site programs, and collaborating with over 350 artists and thinkers. Its programs include on-site experimental classrooms and online labs, residencies, public art, exhibitions, lectures, workshops, symposia, and research processes. An open-access Library with over 300 essays, interviews, documentation, and pedagogical resources expands this work into a growing alternative critical pensum of Latin American artistic and pedagogical practices.

At the heart of the platform is a commitment to reciprocal exchange: not exporting a model from one place to another, but creating conditions for different forms of knowledge to meet, circulate, and transform one another.