Leandro Martinez Depietri
Email:
l9martinez@ucsd.edu
Pronouns:
He/Him
Biography:
Leandro Martínez Depietri is an Argentine curator, critic, educator and art researcher who currently resides between Buenos Aires, Argentina, and San Diego, United States, while he pursues his PhD in Art History, Theory and Criticism at UCSD. His work delves into the structuring fictions of modern and contemporary Latin America, challenging normative identity constructions through the frameworks of historical materialism, anti-colonial theory and queer theory.
He has been working independently as a curator since 2014, carrying out multiple artistic projects in Argentina and abroad and working often in alliance with queer and indigenous artists. In 2024, he curated the first anthological exhibition of the Argentine queer textile duo Chiachio & Giannone (https://www.chiachiogiannone.com/Web/) at Colección Amalita (https://coleccionamalita.org.ar/) and edited the first comprehensive book on their work, both under the title of Vivir sus vidas (2024). He was the curator for the first gallery show of La Chola Poblete, Tenedor de hereje (2021), at Pasto Galería and his curatorial text for the exhibition was featured in Guaymallen (2024), a book on Poblete’s work edited by Deutsche Bank after she was named Artist of the Year 2023. In 2021, he co-curated for MUNTREF-Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (https://untref.edu.ar/muntref/es/centro-de-arte-contemporaneo/) together with French philosopher Barbara Cassin and Argentine art historian Marina Aguerre the exhibition Después de Babel. Traducciones rioplatenses, which surveyed 500 years of visual and literary culture in the Río de la Plata region through a decolonial approach to translation as a worldmaking practice. He also curated Alexis Minkiewicz’s solo shows Erótica Laboral (2022) at Enlace Art in Progress in Girona, Spain, and Rep(úb)lica (2019/2020) at MArCo-Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de La Boca (https://museomarco.org/) in Buenos Aires and edited the accompanying books of both exhibitions.
Institutionally, he has served as a Curatorial Team Member for BIENALSUR 2021 -the International Contemporary Art Biennial of the South- working under the artistic directorship of Diana Wechsler, where he carried out curatorial projects for different partner institutions such as the Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo in Buenos Aires, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de la Provincia de Buenos Aires in Mar del Plata, among others. Previously, he worked in different positions and several projects for the first two iterations of BIENALSUR (2017 and 2019), curating the exhibition Memorias Urgentes (2019) that featured works by Gabriel Chaile, Cristina Piffer, and Bernardo Oyarzún for the Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo de Montevideo and collaborating with artists such as Katsuhiko Hibino for TURN Project Buenos Aires and Lima. He also served as Associate Curator for Pasto Galería (http://www.pastogaleria.com.ar/) in Buenos Aires between 2015 and 2017 and as the McMullan Family Intern at the Photography Department of the Art Institute of Chicago (Spring 2018) where he contributed with research for acquisitions and exhibitions.
Leandro holds an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2019), for which he was awarded the New Artist Society Scholarship, and a BA in Image and Sound Design from the University of Buenos Aires (2017). He received several grants and scholarships to participate in training programs in Europe and the United States such as the 2018 Summer University at Centre Pompidou, the 2018 Critical Theory Workshop at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and the 2019 Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans organized by Independent Curators International (ICI). In 2020, he was awarded a prize at the 1st Contest for Critical Essays on Argentine and Latin American Art organized by Fundación PROA + AACA (Argentine Art Critics Association) and his essay "From Assistance to Intervention, the Urgency of a Social Turn in Argentine Art" was published by Fundación PROA (https://ri.conicet.gov.ar/bitstream/handle/11336/245395/CONICET_Digital_Nro.7fc4db6e-a14b-432d-be47-bd2d6e2ecc8f_C.pdf?sequence=5&isAllowed=y). He is the author of the book Putting Things on Black & White, a critical view on the emerging discussion about race in Argentine contemporary art, which was published as part of the series Argentina Hoy directed by Dr. Diana Wechsler, and contributed an essay on the Italo-Argentine artist Lucio Fontana for the Art Institute of Chicago's exhibition catalog Material Meanings (2020), as well as an essay for the project Silver Rights (2021) by Italian artist Elena Mazzi.
