Cisneros Collection Donates Works by 91 Contemporary Latin American Artists to Six Museums
In New York, 90 works are going to MoMA, with the Bronx Museum getting 12.
Today, the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) announced that it is donating a little over 200 works by 91 contemporary Latin American artists to six museums: the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Bronx Museum, the University of Texas Austin’s Blanton Museum, Madrid’s Museo National Centro de Arte Reina, Museo de Arte Moderno Buenos Aires, and Peru’s Museo de Arte de Lima. MoMA received the largest donation of 90 works, including pieces by Carlos Amorales, Luis Camnitzer, and Regina José Galindo. The Bronx Museum’s 12 new works include a Javier Téllez and a Melanie Smith. (Rounding out the donation, the Blanton Museum received 45 works, the Reina Sofía got 39, Lima got 10, and Buenos Aires received eight.)
This is far from the first time CPPC has made such a donation. Today’s gift to MoMA follows a previous donation of 102 works of modern Latin American art to the museum in 2016, and just last year, CCPC made a donation of 119 colonial artworks to five museums, including the Blanton and Museo de Arte de Lima.
In a phone interview with Hyperallergic earlier this afternoon, CPPC’s director and chief curator, Gabriel Perez-Barreiro, explained that the organization was already in the process of negotiating a donation to MoMA when they decided to expand it to other museums as well. While CPPC already had a longstanding relationship with several of the museums, they were looking to add some new institutions to their roster, like the Bronx Museum, which has its own Latin American art collection that’s “very different from MoMA’s, but equally important,” said Perez-Barreiro.
Perez-Barreiro noted that CPPC worked with each individual museum in the selection of specific works (sometimes with a whole year of back-and-forth), so that each donation is tailored to the needs of the institution. The goal is to reinforce the strength of preexisting Latin American collections, while at the same time providing avenues for new representation, so the donations include a nice mix of “household names and younger artists.”
Those younger artists were particularly happy to hear the news this morning, the first time they were aware that their works were even up for donation. (CPPC didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, so the artists themselves weren’t a part of the process.) By the time we talked to him, Perez-Barreiro had already gotten several emails from artists “pleasantly surprised with the gift.”
Below, we’ve included a sneak peak into more works by Latin American contemporary artists that you can expect to see very soon at MoMA and the Bronx Museum.
