A Humanities Scholar with a Public Vocation
Dr. Julián Sánchez González is a globally minded art historian and political scientist invested in co-creating accessible platforms to share specialized knowledge in modern and contemporary art history, comparative religious studies, and sociopolitical analysis. His career has unfolded at the highest institutional levels of his field, where he has designed, developed, and managed impactful academic, museological, and educational initiatives with a wide range of stakeholders, from grassroots communities to board members, at both national and international levels. He is fluent in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese.
As a museum worker, Sánchez González has led and administered multi-year research and public outreach initiatives centered on strengthening Latin American and Caribbean modern and contemporary art. As a fellow at the The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), he conceived and developed the project "Bridging the Sacred: Spiritual Streams in 20th-Century Latin American and Caribbean Art, 1920–1970," supporting the programming of The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America. At the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), he served as the Caribbean Cultural Institute’s inaugural fellow, undertaking the collection study "Vessels of Myth: The Shamanic Paradigm in the Works of Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, Belkis Ayón, and Purvis Young." Earlier in his career, he held the positions of Coordinator of Education and Public Engagement at the Museos de Arte y Numismática del Banco de la República de Colombia in Bogotá, where he oversaw the work of sixteen educators and offered specialized pedagogical approaches to the museums' collections. His work has reached thousands of engaged audiences through publications, interviews, conferences, collection exhibition and development, and community outreach programs.
As a scholar and educator, Sánchez González has directed and communicated innovative research projects through wide-ranging institutional partnerships, bringing visibility to the work of women, queer, Indigenous and Afro-diasporic artists. During his doctoral studies in Art History at Columbia University, he focused on the creative and spiritual work of artists from Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, and California, resulting in his dissertation "Lucerna Extincta: Spiritual Promiscuities in Performance and Installation Art, 1970s–80s." As a master’s student and Fulbright Scholar in Art History at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, he positioned the work of artists from the San Andrés and Providencia Caribbean archipelago within a broader regional perspective. Training under the aegis of leading professors Kellie E. Jones and Edward J. Sullivan, he published 27 essays and co-organized 18 convenings in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, folding in dozens of international collaborators as well as securing institutional and financial support from research institutes, universities, libraries, galleries, cultural centers, and individual donors. He also holds a double BA in Political Science and History from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá.
Sánchez González is currently co-designing and co-developing exploratory, public-facing institutional platforms that build scholarly and artistic research in the humanities alongside specialized and non-specialized audiences. He authored and co-produced the episode “El diablo no está invitado” for the award-winning iHeartMedia podcast Radio Ambulante, which recounts Colombia’s Primer Congreso Mundial de Brujería and has garnered over 50,000 reproductions in the past three years. Most recently, he conceived and co-directed the conference "Conjuro: conversaciones sobre arte, espiritualidades y saberes alternativos," which contributed to the two-day popular fair "Brujería: espiritualidades no hegemónicas" at the Claustro San Ignacio-Comfama in Medellín. The event established a nationwide conversation in Colombia on the importance of alternative spiritualities as catalysts for creativity and resistance, engaging over 6,000 in-person participants and reaching an estimated 10 million people through a coordinated media communications strategy.
Image courtesy of Corporación Fernando González – Otraparte / Cristian Ángel.