The Cisneros Institute at The Museum of Modern Art offers scholars, writers, and curators the opportunity to conduct research about the Museum’s holdings of Latin American art. This first year, the Latin American Collection Fellowship’s focus will be on the concrete and abstract works donated to MoMA in 2016 by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.
MoMA has been committed to representing and exhibiting works by artists from Latin America since its beginnings. From the first acquisitions of art from the region, in 1930, the collection now encompasses more than 5,700 objects across all curatorial departments. The Patricia Phelps the Cisneros Modern Gift, offered to the Museum between 1997 and 2016, included 145 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper made between the 1940s and 1990s by artists working in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela. It focuses on the development of concrete and neo-concrete art, madí art, and kinetic art. This gift, along with an additional Cisneros donation of contemporary art, significantly transformed MoMA’s holdings of Latin American art, upholding the Museum’s position as one of the most outstanding repositories of late-modern and contemporary art from Latin America.