Richard Armstrong, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, and Jürg Zeltner, CEO of UBS Wealth Management, today announced an ambitious five-year collaboration to chart creative activity and contemporary art from around the world. The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative will identify and support a network of art, artists, and curators from South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa as part of a comprehensive program involving curatorial residencies, acquisitions for the Guggenheim’s collection, international touring exhibitions, and far-reaching educational activities.
The innovative initiative aims to survey art in each of the selected regions and bring wider attention to the vibrant artistic and cultural practices occurring across the globe. “To a great degree, our view of art history remains Western-centric,” Armstrong said. “Through this initiative, we hope to challenge that view.” The project will broaden the geographic outreach of the Guggenheim and other institutions by forging relationships among curators, artists, and educators on regional and global levels. By fostering international creative exchange, Zeltner said, the project will “bring contemporary art to a wider audience and encourage the acquisition and exhibition of artworks that open important new perspectives.” Over five years, the project will focus successively on the selected regions, beginning with South and Southeast Asia. The Guggenheim will invite one curator from each region to participate in overlapping two-year residencies in New York, during which the curator will work with Guggenheim staff to identify new and recent artworks that reflect a range of each region’s most salient cultural practices and intellectual discourses. June Yap, who most recently organized an exhibition of work by Ho Tzu Nyen for the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011, has been named Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, South and Southeast Asia. Works selected for the initiative will be presented in traveling exhibitions, each of which will open at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and then travel to its respective focus region and a major city elsewhere in the world. Each will be accompanied by a customized suite of educational opportunities for the public, both at the exhibition venues and online.
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