Gabriela Rangel arrived in Tucson with only half her books. The other half she donated to a public library before moving her life from New York to the Sonoran Desert.
She brought her two cats — Olga, from Argentina, and Conrad, from New York — and set out to lead the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson. Here, she says, she has found balance in the mountains of Sabino Canyon and in a city where she still senses something she believes many global metropolises have gradually lost: a deeply democratic and community-oriented spirit.
Rangel, who was born in Caracas, Venezuela, became executive director of MOCA in September with a clear idea of what a Latina leader could bring to a borderland institution.
“A more open vision of culture,” she said. “Because culture is not monocultural, and it’s not spoken in just one language.”
Rangel speaks several languages and believes that alone helps shape the conversation in a border city.
For her, directing a museum also means bringing a broader view of the world. That perspective surfaced in an unexpected moment of pop culture: Bad Bunny’s appearance at the Super Bowl.
“I identify with that energy, that passion,” she said. “With the desire to see migration not as a problem, but as something that adds.”
In her view, the museum can become a space for dialogue grounded in a plurality of influences.
“That’s what I can contribute here,” she said.
That plurality, Rangel said, is already visible in the museum’s galleries. At a time when Tucson remains shaped by debates over immigration and political tensions, MOCA has chosen to approach those conversations through art.
Rangel said that direction did not begin with her arrival, but it is one she intends to continue.
“The museum had already assumed that responsibility,” she said. “And it will continue doing so.”
One current exhibition, “Living With Injury,” explores water contamination on the south side of Tucson. Organized by a collective of artists and activists, the show serves as a warning about environmental risks facing the region.
“It’s a type of activism that comes from the community,” Rangel said.
Another exhibition features the work of Mexican artist Fernando Palma Rodríguez. His installation, “Tlazohuelmanaz (Offering of Love),” combines simple technology with symbolic references to explore the relationship between Mexico and the United States.
“There is an interpretation of the binational relationship,” she said.
After studying film, communications and curatorial studies in Cuba, Venezuela and the United States, Rangel built a career focused on contemporary Latin American art that took her to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and later to New York. There, she spent years as director and chief curator of visual arts at Americas Society.
Now, for the first time in a career that has taken her across the Americas, she is based in the borderlands.
“I’ll be honest — I had never lived on the border before,” Rangel said in a deep steady voice. At 62, she speaks with decades of experience and the confidence of a curator accustomed to thinking on an international scale.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Question: What surprised you most when you arrived in Tucson — the landscape, the arts community or the desert?
Answer: The hospitality of the people. The people are wonderful.
Q: Caracas, New York, Buenos Aires, México — and now Tucson. What makes this city unique in your career?
A: There’s a democratic and community spirit that perhaps global cities have lost. Here people don’t prioritize money first, but empathy, kindness, quality of life and many things that have to do with living together.
Q: What kind of conversation should MOCA generate about the border?
A: I think MOCA should see the border not as a problem but as part of its own constitution. That’s something the museum has already done, perhaps not explicitly, but now it is articulating it more clearly. The border here isn’t something debated only in universities or academia — it’s part of everyday life in Tucson. The border is what defines this city.
Q: How do you imagine MOCA in five years?
A: I would like MOCA to have permanent public support. We have lived through grants and foundations, which are very prestigious, but no museum survives only on that. Grants add prestige to a trajectory, but the community needs to organize and support MOCA and understand that this museum offers something different from a collection-based museum. This is a museum that presents the world as it is, questions it, debates it and projects it forward — and that’s very important.
Q: You’ve said you feel bicultural. How does that translate into MOCA?
A: Yes, I am bicultural because I’m a U.S. citizen. I’ve lived in this country for more than 20 years. I move comfortably between English and Spanish, and I understand the cultural processes of this country. How does that show up? I think it’s even in the way I write and think. I exist in a hybrid space all the time.
Q: If MOCA Tucson were a work of art, what would it be?
A: Hmmmm, possibly something by Gordon Matta-Clark. He was bicultural — the son of Chilean artist Roberto Matta and an American surrealist artist. Why? Because MOCA’s architecture is very important, and he was a great critic and reinventor of architecture in art.
Q: If you could invite any artist, living or dead, to dinner in Tucson?
A: Coco Fusco. I think she’s someone who should come here because she understands mechanisms of power. At the border those mechanisms are very interesting to read and discuss through someone like her — a public intellectual and an important Latinx voice nationally.
Q: What work of art changed your perspective on something important in your life?
A: A dance by Trisha Brown, when she climbed the walls of a museum with her dancers in New York. She challenged gravity. You can challenge the body — you can do whatever you want when someone wants to create a poetic understanding of space and time.
Q: You said you were looking for a quieter life moving from New York to Tucson. Did you find it?
A: No because I have a lot of work — she says with a long laugh. That peace hasn’t arrived yet. But sometimes I manage to get out to Sabino Canyon.
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