Closely Watched Curator Raphael Fonseca Joins Lisbon’s Culturgest
6April 23, 2026
Raphael Fonseca, who in 2021 joined the Denver Art Museum (DAM) as its first-ever curator of Latin American modern and contemporary art, has been appointed visual arts programmer at Culturgest in Lisbon. He will move to Lisbon in June before taking up his role at the private foundation, which belongs to state-owned Portuguese bank Caixa Geral de Depósito. Fonseca succeeds Bruno Marchand, who in March took up the role of deputy director of Porto’s Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia. The foundation has said that Marchand will have charge of Culturgest’s visual arts programming through the end of 2026. The transition comes at a busy time for the Rio de Janeiro–born Fonseca, who plans to remain with DAM as curator-at-large. He is currently organizing Yi-Fan Li’s Taiwan pavilion at the Sixty-First Venice Biennale, which will open in May; too, he is a member of the curatorial team of the Counterpublic Triennial, set to take place in St. Louis this fall. With Yina Jiménez Suriel, Fonseca will codirect the 2027 edition of Rejkjavík’s biennial Sequences festival. He was previously chief curator of the Fourteenth Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2025. Among the exhibitions Fonseca has curated at DAM are a 2024 survey of Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, which traveled to the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, and to MALBA, Buenos Aires; and a 2022 group show titled “Who Tells a Tale Adds a Tale,” showcasing the work of millennial artists from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico. Before arriving to the Denver institution, he spent several years as a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Niterói, in Brazil.