Two New York collectors donate nearly 300 works to a Spanish museum

Alicante (Spain), Apr 14 (EFE) .- Two New York collectors, the gallery owner of that city Michael Jenkins and the Spanish historian Javier Romero, have decided to donate about 300 works to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACA) in Alicante ( east of Spain).
The pieces, which run through the avant-garde of the last fifty years and are valued at just over 2.3 million dollars, will place the exhibition center as one of the main references of its specialty in Spain.
The collection is made up of 291 works by 155 different international artists, including Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Long, Takashi Murakami, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Serra, Kara Walker and Andy Warhol.
The catalog also brings together works by artists who were born or developed their professional career in the province of Alicante, including Teresa Lanceta, Olga Diego and Jesús Zuazo.
The series of works brought together by Jenkins and Romero, born in Elda (Alicante), has as a common thread a strong social component, since it unites the signatures of consecrated authors with those of others not so well known but who have reflected on their careers around to issues such as gender, sexual identity, poverty or race.
The creators represent 40 percent of the list of authors included in this collection, which also includes the dozen of the most relevant African-American artists of the last decades. Likewise, among the donated pieces is an important sample of the work of homosexual artists who addressed sexual identity in the 1980s, during the outbreak of AIDS.
The collectors have also wanted to give the greatest vision and breadth of what happened in the artistic, social and political context, so they tried to represent all languages ​​and a wide variety of artistic media in this collection, from drawing to drawing. sculpture, through painting, graphic work, photography, installation, artist’s book or video.
In this way, the diversity of the practice of modern and contemporary artists and the extreme variety of natures, artistic techniques, supports and materials used in the execution of their pieces is reflected.
As the owners of the collection told Efe, the donation fills the gaps that remained to be covered in the MACA directory, which was born in 1977 from another donation, the one that the local artist Eusebio Sempere bequeathed to the city.
In his personal collection, Sempere treasured pieces by the main avant-garde authors of the 20th century such as Jean Arp, Francis Bacon, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall or the Spanish Pablo Picasso, Eduardo Chillida, Salvador Dalí, Rafael Canogar, Julio González or Pablo Gargallo.
Subsequently, in 1990, the center received the posthumous legacy of the Alicante painter Juana Francés, made up of a good number of her own works of art, to which the Foundation’s collection of Spanish contemporary art was also added in 2012. Mediterráneo, brought together by the cultural section of the now defunct Caja Mediterráneo financial institution.
The Alicante City Council, owner of the exhibition center, has already accepted the donation and the museum’s management trusts that the pieces can be exhibited at the end of 2021, the year in which, precisely, the tenth anniversary of the MACA expansion is celebrated. Before that, a budget line must be approved for the transport of parts from New York by air.

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