A Conversation with Vik Muniz, Artist & Founder, Escola Vidigal, and Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, Senior Program Officer, Ford Foundation

Leaders of AEFI member foundations will gather in New York City in September 2026 for an in-person, invitation-only event presented by AEFI and hosted by Sikkema Malloy Jenkins art gallery, reflecting on artists, legacy, and philanthropy. The program will feature a conversation with Vik Muniz, artist and founder of Rio’s Escola Vidigal, and Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, Senior Program Officer, Creativity & Free Expression, Ford Foundation.

Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Vik Muniz lives and works between New York City and Rio de Janeiro. He is renowned for employing diverse materials, including dust, sugar, chocolate, diamonds, caviar, toys, junk, scrap metal, vintage postcards, and magazine shreds, to reconstruct familiar images in an altered form, exploring the relationship between reality and representation, and individual and collective memory. His works are held in public collections internationally, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Tokyo’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Modern, among others.

In 2001, Vik Muniz represented Brazil at the 49th Venice Biennale. In 2010, he was the subject of an Academy Award-nominated documentary entitled Waste Land, and in 2011, he was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. In 2014, he founded and built Escola Vidigal, a school of art, design, and technology in Rio de Janeiro serving local children living in the city’s culturally rich but economically under-resourced Favela Vidigal. Directed by the artist, the school provides free classes based on the core concept of visual literacy.

Rocío Aranda-Alvarado is an art historian, curator, and foundation program officer. She joined the Ford Foundation in 2018 after serving as curator at El Museo del Barrio for nearly a decade. At Ford, she is a Senior Program Officer on the Creativity and Free Expression team, focusing on support for arts and culture organizations across the U.S. At El Museo, she presented visual arts and programming that reflected the history and culture of El Barrio as well as the greater US Latinx and Latin American diaspora. She organized exhibitions featuring emerging and established artists, including Presente! The Young Lords in New York, and Museum Starter Kit, for El Museo’s 45th anniversary, and several versions of El Museo’s biennial. 

As a reminder, this AEFI collegial program is open, with no-fee registration, to leaders, senior staff, and board members of AEFI’s member foundations as well as our individual Seminar alum members. Not yet an AEFI member foundation or Seminar alum member? It’s not too late. Check out the membership info here. 

With Thanks to Our Event Sponsors

Sokoloff + Associates ● The Darms Office | Art & Archives ● Canyon Media Art Conservation Center | CMACC

And AEFI’s Lead Underwriters: