About Me
Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy (She/Her) is a New York-based curator, writer, art historian, and arts and grants administrator. Her practice advocates for underrepresented communities, stories, materials, and approaches in the art world. Her research investigates the “aesthetics of optimism,” the subversive power of humor, cuteness, and leisure as tools of protest. She is the Director of the New York City Department of Transportation Art.
Vizcarrondo-Laboy also served as Assistant Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), New York, where from 2016 to 2022, she was part of MAD’s curatorial team, helping organize over twenty exhibitions and projects. During her time there, she also led MAD’s Burke Prize, a prestigious contemporary craft award. Her most recent exhibition, the critically acclaimed Funk You Too! Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture brought together over fifty historical and contemporary works to contextualize today’s ceramic practice within the legacy of West Coast Funk ceramics and their makers, particularly their use of humor for critique and personal expression (2023, MAD).
In 2022 she curated The Universe Within at Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, an exhibition celebrating the interiority and multifacetedness of women-identifying and non-binary artists of the Black diaspora, Belonging: 2022 NCECA Annual at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, to investigate how belonging is defined, established, and maintained in the United States and an exhibition in collaboration with The Color Network at Grounds For Sculpture, Hamilton, New Jersey, titled Fragile: Earth, exploring different perspectives on fragility. She juried the annual Hawai’i Craftsmen exhibition and curated Out of Office, an open-call exhibition investigating the relationship between leisure and work for Collar Works, Troy, New York, in 2021.
She also created and co-hosts the podcast Clay in Color with artist Alex Anderson which focuses on artists of color engaging with strategies of humor, cuteness, and the decorative in ceramics. In 2020, Vizcarrondo-Laboy curated Clay Is Just Thick Paint, an exhibition of Jennifer Rochlin’s ceramics for the Jane Hartsook Gallery, New York. She also curated Sleight of Hand, which brought together the work of six contemporary artists of color using humor in ceramics as a powerful tool of resistance, resilience, and healing, for the Center for Craft, Asheville, North Carolina, where she was a 2020 Curatorial Fellow.
Her new book, New Women’s Work, reflecting on the relationship between “feminine” crafts and contemporary art through conversations with artists, with Smith Street Books, is slated for 2024. She is one of the inaugural recipients of the Cultured Magazine x Parker Pen Writer’s Grant, for which she penned Seriously Cute: Six Artists Harnessing the Power Dichotomy of Cuteness, which was reprinted in White Chapel Gallery’s Documents of Contemporary Art: The Cute edited by Sianne Ngai. She was the first mentor for The Color Network and Artaxis Curatorial Fellowship, and her essay on Aline Berdichevsky’s and Julia Turner’s jewelry relating to the US-Mexico border and the plight of Latinx immigrants was published in MAD’s Jewelry Stories: Highlights from the Collection 1947–2019. She has also been published in the Journal of Modern Craft and American Craft Magazine and multiple exhibition catalogs.
She holds a BA in Art History from the University of Florida with minors in Anthropology and Ceramics and an MA from the Bard Graduate Center, New York, in Decorative Arts, Design History, & Material Culture. Vizcarrondo-Laboy was born and raised in Puerto Rico.
