Venezuela Built a Cultural Powerhouse—And Its Art World Refuses to Disappear

Carlos Cruz-Diez, Ambientación de Color Aditivo, Caracas, 1974. Simón Bolívar International Airport, Maiquetía, Venezuela. © Atelier Cruz-Diez Paris, 2025. All works are © Carlos Cruz-Diez / Bridgeman Images 2025

Venezuela is home to the world’s largest reserves of oil and gold, hence today’s geopolitical focus on the country, but for decades, it was also one of the most vibrant international centers of artistic and cultural life. That is, until much of its intellectual, creative and collecting class was gradually forced into exile, first under the Chávez regime and later during the continued rule of President Nicolás Maduro. They are among the more than 7 million Venezuelans who have migrated in response to ongoing economic and political crises, with the vast majority leaving during Maduro’s tenure. Yet many others stayed and continued—resiliently—to open exhibitions, work in museums and galleries and, perhaps most importantly, make art.

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For days now, I have been gathering stories and voices from Venezuela’s artistic and cultural community, both within the country and in the diaspora. As an Italian who has long moved through the international art world, I’ve been in close contact with many Venezuelans—dear friends—who share the pain of distance alongside the enduring hope of return. I wanted to center the human side of what’s unfolding through the lens of art, at a time when global attention is on oil and the larger games of political and economic power. The word that comes to mind is resilience, paired with a clear awareness of what Venezuela’s cultural scene once was and what it continues to be. Thank you to all who have shared so generously. I will shape this work into chapters that move across time, context and voice. This first chapter feels like the necessary beginning: a look back at what Caracas was—and at those who still hope for its return to the artistic and cultural splendor it once reached, built on a belief in culture-led development that continues to resonate globally.

Venezuela’s postwar golden period: art as public infrastructure

In the immediate postwar years, Caracas shone as an international art hub. At the start of the 20th Century, Venezuela was largely agrarian and politically unstable. But the discovery and export of vast oil reserves transformed both its economy and its state institutions. By the mid-20th Century, Venezuela had become one of the world’s leading oil producers, fueling rapid urbanization and, for long stretches, political stability and relative prosperity compared with many of its neighbors.

Although the country increasingly became a rentier economy—overly dependent on oil exports, with weak productive diversification and deepening corruption that would later pave the way for Chávez’s attempted military coup—it was during this period (1958-1990) that the state used oil revenues not only to fund industrialization, social programs and infrastructure but also to embed culture directly into the nation-building project.

Extractive revenues were invested in architecture, universities, museums, public art and cultural patronage—treating culture as public infrastructure for the future. In 1974, internationally acclaimed kinetic artist Carlos Cruz-Diez designed the chromatic floor environment at Simón Bolívar International Airport, transforming a transit space into a perceptual experience. As early as the 1970s—well ahead of comparable developments elsewhere—the stations of the Metro de Caracas featured integrated works by Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Alejandro Otero, reinforcing the idea that abstraction could inhabit mass public space as a way to reimagine relationships between people, place and the future.

Museums, universities, theaters, orchestras and public art commissions were supported as civic infrastructure, reflecting a pioneering belief that cultural investment was key to national development and international influence—placing art and culture at the center of the political agenda, not unlike what we see today in parts of the Gulf. Venezuela anticipated this model early on and, crucially, never stopped believing in it—shaping an entire generation of artists and collectors with few equals in the region or beyond at the time.

This cultural flourishing did not emerge in a vacuum. As New York-based, Venezuelan-born dealer Henrique Faria emphasized in conversation, the country had long been dominated by a small group of landowning elites. Many were educated in Europe, particularly France, and belonged to a highly cultured class deeply connected to European intellectual life—especially in Paris, which, between the 1920s and 1940s, stood as the global center of art and the avant-gardes. This transatlantic connection predated the postwar exodus and laid the groundwork for the extraordinary flowering of Venezuelan culture in the 1960s and 1970s, when the country consolidated one of the most sophisticated art scenes in Latin America.

One of the masterpieces that best embodies the spirit of that era is the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, now recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site. “When the Universidad Central was built, that moment really consolidated the integration of art into Caracas,” recalls Faria. Conceived by Carlos Raúl Villanueva as a true synthesis of the arts, the campus permanently integrated works by a select group of Venezuelan artists alongside internationally renowned masters, including Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Wifredo Lam and Victor Vasarely. Calder’s Floating Clouds, engineered as an acoustic ceiling for the Aula Magna, remain one of the high points of his ability to merge organic abstraction with architecture, sound and space. Inaugurated in 1954, the UCV formed part of a larger wave of national university projects across Latin America, each intended to send a clear message to the world: We are modern, and, like the French, we have our own Cité universitaire.

Venezuelan artists Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Alejandro Otero—as well as internationally celebrated figures such as Gego—actively participated in this project. Many were part of the so-called dissidents, a generation of artists who received state support to study in Europe. Inspired by early........

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