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In the 1990s Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and Gustavo A. Cisneros formalized their growing art collection as the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) in order to share their holdings internationally. They had already been collecting Latin American art for decades, with five distinct areas of focus: modern, contemporary, colonial, traveler art, and Orinoco. The CPPC’s modern collection is especially strong in geometric abstraction from the region’s major metropolitan centers: Caracas, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. By lending works to major museums around the world and fomenting scholarship into the CPPC’s collecting strengths, the Colección helped shift the conversation about Latin American art toward abstraction and incorporate Latin American art into understandings of international modernism. The CPPC’s staff included at various times such prominent curators as Luis Pérez-Oramas, Paulo Herkenhoff, Ariel Jiménez, Rafael Romero, Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, and Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, and co-directors Ileen Kohn and Alexa Halaby. In 2008, the Cisneros’ daughter Adriana Cisneros de Griffin became the president of the CPPC. |
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Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) launched its website in the early 2000s to further its research and outreach missions. The website included audiovisual recordings of interviews with artists, of scholarly talks and panels, and of commentary on the works in the collection by curators. The website also published original texts, and offered free downloads of the CPPC publications from the Conversaciones/Conversations book series of artist interviews. The website and all its contents were available until 2022, when it was archived. In 2022, the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros donated its digital archive of research materials to The Museum of Modern Art. This LibGuide presents materials from the CPPC’s website, alongside information about Mrs. Cisneros’s donations to MoMA’s art collection, and the ongoing research and programming of the Cisneros Institute, an independent research center within the Museum. The archived website was captured on March 22, 2022 and can be accessed in its entirety via the Wayback Machine. |
