MALBA celebrates 15th anniversary, prepares a second museum

Global Business

The Buenos Aires Museum of Latin American Art made news headlines earlier this year when its founder Eduardo Costantini paid a record $15 million for a painting by a Latin American artist.

Now as the gallery celebrates its 15th anniversary, plans are underway to build a second museum in an underprivileged area of the city.

CCTV America’s Joel Richards reports.

MALBA is home to some of the region’s finest works including artists such as Frida Kahlo, Joaquin Torres Garcia and Antonio Berni. MALBA opened in 2001 with pieces donated from the private collection of the millionaire Eduardo Costantini.

Now as the museum celebrates its 15th anniversary, it’s looking to broaden the institution’s social role.

The museum is located in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Buenos Aires and yet just behind the train tracks nearby is one of the most impoverished communities in the city, and it’s there where MALBA is hoping to build a second museum.

The neighborhood where MALBA plans to expand is barely a few hundred meters away. Called villa 31, it has urgent basic needs. For more than a decade, the non-government organization PH15 has been running photography workshops in shanty towns like this.

The new MALBA is thought of as a bridge between two contrasting communities on either side of the train tracks.