Gabriela Rangel arrived in Tucson last year to take the helm of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson after a long international career in the arts. Raised in Caracas, Venezuela, Rangel said she’s worked in many places — from Cuba to New York to Houston — and that those experiences inform how she approaches programming and community engagement at MOCA. She described the museum as a platform for immediate, living conversations about the present, and said she sees its role as creating space for dialogue rather than pushing a single ideology.
MOCA Tucson director photographed in profile inside the museum during an interview about using museums as spaces to help heal differences.
Rangel said she never pictured herself living in a place like Tucson, but that the city’s character and hospitality drew her in. She compared her first impressions of Tucson to San Antonio, a city she came to appreciate while living and working in Houston: both places have distinct personalities, pride in local culture, and an intimacy she found appealing. Beyond aesthetics, Rangel said the warmth and frank curiosity of people in Tucson — what she called a disarming hospitality — stood out to her after years moving through larger, more frenetic cultural centers.
That sense of place matters to Rangel because MOCA Tucson is not a traditional collecting institution. She described it as a Kunsthalle, an institution without a permanent collection that focuses on temporary exhibitions by living artists. That model, she said, allows the museum to be nimble: to experiment, take risks, and stage multidisciplinary programs that reflect multiple artistic practices. Working with contemporary artists means addressing the complexities of the present — what she called the zeitgeist — rather than producing a journalistic account of current events.
An artist’s presence inside MOCA’s galleries, Rangel said, helps create sites where art intersects with music, literature and dance — areas in which Tucson has a thriving scene. "We are invited to do multidisciplinary programming because we work with living artists, and living artists are looking at different directions," she said, noting the museum’s freedom to respond to the cultural moment. That approach has led her to assemble shows and collaborations that intentionally cross genres and cultural forms, reflecting the hybrid creative life she described as central to her curatorial practice.
An artist stands among prints and silhouette works in a gallery at MOCA Tucson, illustrating the museum’s focus on exhibitions that prompt dialogue and healing.
Rangel also emphasized the bicultural and multilingual lens she brings to the role. She said working in a ‘‘hybrid space’’ — culturally and linguistically — creates an openness that monocultural perspectives may not afford. That hybridity shapes curatorial choices, she added, and is reflected in projects she has mounted or co-curated. She cited, for example, a recent exhibition of artists she has worked with over the past three years who occupy hybrid positions themselves, including the feminist collective Hilma’s Ghost, whose members come from India and New York.
The museum’s geographic context informed much of Rangel’s thinking. Tucson’s proximity to the U.S.–Mexico border, she said, gives the city a layered identity: it is deeply connected to Mexican culture yet also marked by tensions and anxieties about immigration and belonging. She cited a recent Netflix documentary about Mexican chef Gabriela Cámara and quoted the filmmaker’s observation that Americans have a ‘‘twofold, schizophrenic relationship with Mexico’’ — simultaneously embracing Mexican food and culture while resenting immigration. That contradiction, Rangel said, is palpable in Tucson, where cultural affinity and unresolved conflicts coexist.
On the subject of politics and art, Rangel is explicit: museums are public spaces, and everything public is political. She invoked the feminist slogan that ‘‘the personal is political,’’ noting that museum programming and exhibitions — even those that appear apolitical or abstract — participate in public life and therefore carry political weight. "Everything that is public is political. Museums are public spaces," she said, adding that even abstract art can be read politically. At the same time, Rangel drew a distinction between politics and ideology: she described her problem as being with ideology rather than politics, saying that ideology divides while politics, properly practiced, can create arenas for community and conversation. She argued that museums should avoid ideological partisanship in favor of fostering common ground and civic exchange.
Rangel’s description of MOCA’s mission emphasizes experimentation, dialogue and the cultivation of diverse perspectives. By prioritizing living artists and multidisciplinary projects, she said the museum can respond quickly to contemporary concerns and act as a forum for different voices to be heard. Her background — growing up in Caracas, working across the Americas, and leading cultural programs in large and midsize cities — informs an approach that seeks to make museums places where differences are presented, discussed and, insofar as possible, healed. She framed that work as rooted in community engagement and the belief that museums have a role to play in public life, offering spaces for exchange rather than arenas for closed ideological dispute.