The Juan March Foundation Museum reaches three decades in Palma and celebrates it by reinventing its spaces. The renovation works, which began in 2018, sought to add to the existing museum the profile of a culture center that would render a better public service to the cultural life of Palma. Thirty years after it opened at 11 Calle Sant Miquel in Palma, the museum is more prepared than ever to host programs and activities in different formats and of a multidisciplinary nature.
Photos: Juan March Foundation.
The creation of new spaces and facilities, exhibition programs and a new line of cultural programming mark this renovation of the museum. Now it makes the most of the spaces dedicated to the collection and exhibitions. In addition, the building has been equipped with multipurpose spaces suitable for its future status as a cultural center. The most obvious change for the public after the reform is that of the new access to the museum, thanks to which the modernist courtyard of the building has been won for the museum as a room more dedicated to sculpture. It has new additions by Baltasar Lobo, Sergi Aguilar, Josep Guinovart, Francisco Farreras, Jorge Oteiza, Julio González and a new large-format flying sculpture, commissioned to José María Yturralde.
This renovation of spaces is only the architectural version of the renewed cultural program that is intended for the museum and that will be fully active in early 2022.
New cultural programming
The program begins in October with the series “The conversation”, an interview format that in its first cycle has invited artists, teachers, educators, curators and museum professionals to talk with a moderator about a topic. The day after each public session there is a seminar-workshop for professionals and colleagues from other institutions in Palma. The conversations can be followed live on Canal March and YouTube.
The program of exhibitions around the collection and the international field of art, common in the museum, will continue to offer between four and five proposals a year, in different formats and spaces. On Wednesday 22, “Ángel Ferrant: a domestic scale” was inaugurated, an intimate exhibition that, in a single room of the museum, presents a hero of sculpture and artistic pedagogy in the Spain of the Second Republic and the postwar period. In the next exhibition, “Pablo Helguera: the comedy of art” (from November 2), the entire space of the museum will be intervened by the Mexican artist with his “Artoons”.
In 2022, national, European and American artists (Frederic Amat, Bruno Munari, Ad Reinhardt, graphic by Pablo Picasso) will continue to meet in the museum’s program and the 20th century classics from the Juan March Foundation collection will coexist with the work of contemporary artists in the exhibition “A history of recent art, 1960-2020”, organized in collaboration with DKV Seguros.
The museum also has a renewed team for this new stage, led by Pablo Pérez d’Ors, who joined the Art Department of the Juan March Foundation in April 2021 as director of the museum. The new team is completed by María Aparicio Munar and Antoni Ferragut Cànaves.
Live culture
Finally, the Juan March Foundation will promote digital content. To this purpose, it has launched the new Foundation and museum website –both premiered on June 29– and the new March Channel, created following the example of the large digital platforms to host the vast collection of audiovisual content accumulated from the programming of concerts, conferences and exhibitions at its three venues since 1975. The Juan March Foundation Museum will take advantage of this new digital infrastructure and will regularly broadcast all its cultural programming live.
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