08/20/2026
Arts Connection Foundation mourns the passing of Nelson Garrido (Caracas, 1952), photographer, teacher, and cultural agitator, the first Venezuelan photographer to receive the National Prize for Visual Arts and the founder of La ONG, the school and cultural center that shaped much of contemporary Venezuelan photography over two decades.
Our relationship with Nelson began before the foundation itself. In 2005, Fundación de Artistas Emergentes (FAE), the organization that preceded Arts Connection Foundation, presented the exhibition Tránsito. His work and his presence accompanied us from that moment onward.
The last time was in January 2025, in the talk “What is Nelson Garrido doing?” There, he traced the evolution of his own work: the themes that pursued him for four decades—death, saints, s*x, violence—and the tools he used to pursue them, from the scanner to artificial intelligence. Listening to him made one thing plain: the tools changed constantly, the questions never did. No one suspected the talk would become a reckoning. We preserve it on video as part of our archive.
Twenty years of conversation. Nelson was there at our beginnings and at our closings, in the celebrations and in the uncomfortable questions. His work, built on staged scenes, popular iconography, humor, and a refusal to take anything for granted, taught us that a space for art only makes sense if it is also a safe place for unsafe ideas.
The talk remains available on our YouTube channel. Link in bio.
Our thoughts are with his family, his students, and the entire Venezuelan artistic community.
