Malba on the Way to 25 Years

Malba on the Way to 25 Years: Exhibitions, Projects, and International Challenges
The new artistic director, Rodrigo Moura, and the founder and current honorary president, Eduardo Costantini, reflect on the present and future of the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires.
Founded by Eduardo Costantini, the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (Malba) is, without a doubt, a living organism, mutating through temporary exhibitions by artists from different generations and countries. Its permanent collection is a powerful shield. It has also charted a clear path for almost 25 years, a milestone it will reach in 2026.

Following the departure of Venezuelan Gabriela Rangel four years ago as artistic director, and the addition last year of Guadalupe Requena, who was with the museum almost from its inception until becoming its institutional director, the time has come for Brazilian Rodrigo Moura, officially appointed last November, to take over as director of the emblematic Buenos Aires space, as well as the new Malba Puertos. Escobar.

Moura is the fifth director and the fourth international, following Mexican Agustín Arteaga (2001-2002), Argentine Marcelo Pacheco (2003-2013), Spanish Agustín Pérez Rubio (2014-2018), and Rangel (2019-2021). This marks, from the outset, an internationalization project sustained by relationships with museums in other countries. In this interview with Infobae Cultura, Costantini and Moura commented that it will grow based on "a coherent policy regarding loans" "with the aim also of seeking reciprocity" with other institutions.

In this sense, Malba has been developing partnerships with museums in other countries for years. Just to name two recent examples, collaboration with the Houston Museum enabled the arrival of Gyula Kosice's Hydrospatial City for the 2024 Intergaláctivo exhibition—which later landed at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami—and even Cao Fei's The Future Is Not a Dream, a Chinese artist, was made possible in partnership with the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. In fact, a few weeks ago, the participation of part of the museum's collection and the Costantini Collection in an exhibition at the National Museum of Doha, Qatar, was announced. However, the search for a museum that houses true gems of regional art, such as Tarsila do Amaral's Abaporu, goes further, and in that sense, the appointment of Moura arrives. He takes over after six years as chief curator at the Museo del Barrio in New York, a central institution for Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean art. He also worked at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), the most important in the country, where he served as curator, and at the Inhotim Institute in Belo Horizonte, of which he was a founding member.
Moura will also be responsible for overseeing the Publications, Education, and Public Programs programs, and for coordinating with the Film and Literature departments, led by Fernando Martín Peña and María Soledad Costantini. With them, he revealed at this meeting, he will seek to "create multidisciplinary exhibitions."

In addition, the museum's honorary president and the new director announced that there will be a Brazilian pop exhibition to close out the 2025 calendar and previewed some of the most important projects for the anniversary, including the arrival of works from the Costantini Collection that have never been shown in the country, among other topics.
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