Randel C. Urbano
Randel C. Urbano is a Vargas Museum worker for four years now. Vargas Museum is the primary modern and contemporary art museum and Filipiniana Research Center of the University of the Philippines. I work as the coordinator of exhibition and events at the museum. I also engage in the public programs of the museum. Simply, with a curatorial staff of three with two installers, I and my colleagues work all around. I also do freelance curatorial, graphic design, exhibition coordination, and workshop facilitation if time permits. I was very much fortunate to have been part of a project of Bangkok Arts and Culture Centre’s “Young Artists Network” in late 2014 to early 2015 as an ‘artist’ residentunderThaicontemporaryartist-curatorHenryTan’s “Autopilot Project.” I was given a curatorial research fellowship at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Korea in 2015. I observed and annotated general working conditions of the MMCA staff, their presented artists, and the “amoeboid” community as an attempt to correlate their working habits to the labor habits in my home museum. I also had the chance to go to the CIMAM 2016 Conference in Barcelona under a Getty Foundation grant. In 2017, I was able to go to the Annual Meeting of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) as a Multicultural Delegate. As the only Southeast Asian among thirty or so international delegates, it was a fortunate experience to share my anecdotes and ideas as a worker for a Filipino university museum and I was able to listen to experiences from colleagues from around the world.