1989 – 2009 / 20th Anniversary of the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno - CAAM

Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM): 20 years of intercultural narration

The Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) opened its doors on the 4th December 1989, with the desire to invigorate the visual arts, critical thinking and artistic culture, within the setting of an Atlantic geostrategy and with a resolute aim of producing intercultural dialogue. The opening exhibition and international seminar, Surrealism between the Old and New Worlds, constituted the first recorded attempt to review the versions of this movement of European art avant-gardes, in the spaces which were at the time considered peripheral, and its transformations in the Caribbean, Latin America, the Canary Islands and Europe.

The art centre was gradually consolidating a marked focus upon Africa, America and Europe, as a flexible, open and progressive framework for art practices and thinking.

The concept of tricontinentality was arrived at as a reference to our singular nature and to the commitment to bringing an artistic circle, which was at the time on the fringe or periphery, to the forefront of the art market.

In museum practice and in publications such as the Atlántica magazine, this nominal expression, tricontinentality, was superseded by the incorporation of visions coming from a now globalized world.

The Collection as a map of the future and the BCD

The Collection of the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno is the result of more than fifty years of public collecting in the Canary Islands. The Collection of the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno is built upon the transfer of a significant part of the collections of 20th-century art of the Cabildo de Gran Canaria, made in 1989, when the museum opened.

One of the initial premises of the CAAM was to articulate its own collection around the work of the El Paso group. The temporary exhibitions organised in the decade of the nineties, based on the founding ideal of tricontinentality, opened up the museum collections to art created in Africa and Latin America in order to display here in the Canary Islands the most important movements and names that were emerging in those parts of the world. The Library and Documentation Centre (BCD), with its singular collection of publications, reflects the concerns of the centre.

At the same time, a move began to make acquisitions from periods and artists not sufficiently represented, such as recent Spanish art. In 2002, the collection of the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno acquired the APM collection, made up of more than 1,600 works, many of them key to the development of the cultural movements of the Canary Islands over the last thirty years. Also in 2002, the CAAM acquired the Colección Memoria of works on paper from the Leyendecker gallery.

Narrating artistic action

Over the years, the CAAM has produced a considerable number of exhibitions. Over a hundred exhibitions now form part of the centre's history. One of the CAAM's lines of work has been to review the artistic production of the great 20th century masters of the Canary Islands. Many extremely important interdisciplinary artists have honoured this art centre with their imposing iconographic presence.

Particularly important were the generation of island artists from the sixties who collaborated to make the CAAM a reality, maintaining their commitment to cultural action even in extremely adverse times.

Especially in recent years, the CAAM directs and undertakes projects that go beyond the arena of the arts: the intercultural and inter-medium dimension of contemporary art, the coordinates of genre, the relationships between territory, design, architecture, sustainability, global networks and communication technologies, and new ways to narrate artistic production. The whole dynamic of art promotion and the generation of ideas, all of the cultural action giving rise to the culture of the project, all of the work behind the exhibitions and the publications holds a conception of the new habits of the visitor, and their demands for interactivity and participation that also suppose a challenge for the museums of the 21st century.

Narrating critical thinking

In parallel, the centre has worked hard promoting, debating and analysing, through courses and seminars that have contributed, in this two-decade-long process, to dismantle obsolescences and neo-colonial nit-picking, and which have helped to relaunch museum practices and thus provide a firm base for the present.

In a nutshell, you could say that these are the voices of the discourse and the curatorial practice that come from resistance and dissent, from a certain heterodoxy that serves as a regulatory praxis of the art system.

Atlántica magazine

We must stress the extraordinary analysing and forecasting work carried out over these years, initially by the publication's first director, José A. Alemán, then by its second director, Andrés Sánchez Robayna, and finally by Antonio and Octavio Zaya, and currently by the latter following the painful loss of Antonio, all of whom have been responsible for the periodic publication Atlántica, which has been able to insert and renew essential paradigms for reflection, whilst also introducing the CAAM art centre itself into the global artistic community.

Global museum, museum 2.0 and DEAC

We see the CAAM as an open museum, which goes out in search of its audiences, that becomes involved in education and the local community, as is only natural, and that, today, with the tools of communication 2.0, is also able to attract the remote user, who participates in the museum through its virtual space. A new web is being developed, which, as well as acting as an instrument for promotion, also allows for a greater participation through the use of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Interior del CAAM

This way, a larger audience is reached and a wider contribution is made to debate, whilst artistic sensibility and an appreciation for contemporary art are fostered, core tasks of the Department of Education and Cultural Action (DEAC), which assumes other, equally fundamental phases of the museum's work: it attends to the public at the museum, it drives programmes to train the trainers and it deploys a wide programme of introductions to art through the “Visual Thinking Strategies” (VTS) programme, serving more than 10,000 schoolchildren from the island of Gran Canaria.

For the action that takes place outside the walls of the museum, the CAAM has a programme of exhibitions in municipalities of Gran Canaria, which it accompanies with workshops and interdisciplinary meetings, led by the recently created external exhibition mounting service.

The modernisation of the CAAM

The CAAM is in continuous transformation, sensitive to the needs of the public and to the ever-changing artistic context; it can and must take on challenges to better fulfil its social role. This has led it to try out a new typology in which the Museum and Art Centre (present in the foundational statutes) are merged with the Centre for Innovation and Production; together, three interrelated pillars for a project that could add another dimension to the museum: that of laboratory and workshop, as well as a service to the artistic community.

With the creation of the Island Agency of the Arts, the creators, cultural agencies and collectors of Gran Canaria will be granted all the financial and legal information that they demand. Furthermore, this agency will help to facilitate the steps needed to give their works (visual, scenic or musical) access to the market, in equal conditions to those of the other Autonomous Communities.

Change of legal status and a new structure

On the 19th May 2008 the Board of Directors of the CAAM agreed to initiate its legal transformation, moving towards the model of a public foundation. The ownership of the future CAAM Canarian Foundation will continue to belong to the Cabildo de Gran Canaria, but the support of the Ayuntamiento de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and the Gobierno de Canarias is also expected, and these organisations will join the foundation, along with the Ministry of Culture, which has invited the CAAM to join Spain's State Museum Network, the Red de Museos del Estado.

In parallel, changes to the structure of the centre have been initiated in order to implement new processes and to provide greater management agility. The content of the new museum practices is provided by the Research and Debate Area, Contemporary Art and Design Observatory, Research and Innovation Laboratories, Department of Design, Publishing and Communication, the Preventative Conservation and Restoration area, and the External Mounting Service.

On the 6th October 2009, the Board of Directors of the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno unanimously approved the public notice and the bases by which the Artistic Management of the CAAM will be chosen, in accordance with the document on best practice for museums and contemporary art centres drawn up by the principal associations in the sector and adopted by the Ministry of Culture.

New audiences and attendance figures

The new museum programme, with more participatory activities and encompassing new creative manifestations, together with the current reflection on social and environmental concerns, has led to a spectacular growth in visitor numbers. Even before the end of the year, 2009 has already seen 54,600 visitors. This influx of visitors has largely been produced thanks to the increase in activities, both in terms of their number and their diversity, from 24 activities in 2007 to 37 in 2008 and more than 80 in 2009. The activities programme is also spread via social networking sites, with the CAAM's Facebook page, opened in August 2009, already having more than 1,000 friends. The activities are also promoted through cultural and educational actions at schools, municipal halls of Gran Canaria and national and international inter-institutional collaboration.