Our galleries have always aimed to highlight the voices of emerging and established artists alike, and we are confident that Carina Evangelista, with her broad experience and diverse skillset, will help us usher in the next iteration of our galleries' vision.

So begins Hakim Bellamy's poem, "Somewhere between Milan and Gallup," with the stacked and stepped lines conjuring rock stairs in canyon trails. It is with such curiosity that I welcome the opportunity to be part of Zane Bennett Galleries. Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, Zane Bennett and form & concept have continually cultivated the space for artists, collectors, and audiences to commune around contemporary forms of expression.

Galleries are at the forefront of critical spaces for the ecosystem of artistic and cultural production to cohere from the artwork’s conception in the artist’s studio to the captured imagination of audiences. It's a welcome challenge for me to draw on my curatorial, editorial, and public programming/community engagement experience to contribute to the unflagging efforts of Zane Bennett Galleries to activate conduits of exchange within that ecosystem. Diving into that space that steers from concept to form and from idea to fruition, so closes Bellamy's poem here that hurtles toward a constellation of theres.

—Carina Evangelista

Carina Evangelista is an arts veteran with a breadth of experience from a wide array of organizations. She has served as Senior Director of Curatorial Affairs at Oklahoma Contemporary; as Deputy Director and subsequently Interim Director at Asia Society Museum and its Global Artistic Programs; as Editor at Artifex Press (now Cahiers d’Art Institute, specializing in catalogue raisonné publishing); as Curator at Delaware Contemporary; and as Curatorial Research Assistant at the Museum of Modern Art.

Also an independent curator, Evangelista organized Special Project: Sol LeWitt for the 2020 Art Fair Philippines, for which she also commissioned the choral performance of, and original choreography for, Caroline Shaw's Partita for 8 Voices. Her writing has been published in the U.S., Germany, and the Philippines and she was a regular contributor to ArtDesk. A cohort member of the 2024 Creative Leaders Guild Institute, she recently served as mentor for Hamiltonian Artists in Washington, D.C.

Projects she has worked on have featured artists such as Poklong Anading, Constancio Bernardo, Chakaia Booker, Crystal Z Campbell, Roberto Chabet, Ashanti Chaplin, Chuck Close, Maren Hassinger, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, Christopher Ho, Akira Kurosawa, Sol LeWitt, Robert Montgomery, Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, Jet Pascua, Howardena Pindell, Ed Ruscha, Eva Schlegel, Yasmin Sison, Tony Smith, Robert Storr, Julian Swartz, and Weegee.

As a conceptual artist who began exhibiting in the Philippines in 2017, she threads historical or art historical references with text, creating or abstracting codes and transmuting symbols. With a creative practice that has tapped disciplines such as animation, film, theater, sound art, and video, she feels a strong fellowship with other artists. Her commitment to supporting artists in materializing their vision for their respective exhibitions has earned her the moniker "artist whisperer."