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| Passion Investments: Art |
Viva la Diferencia
Catherine Curan
07/01/2007
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Cisneros and her husband structured their holdings as a study
collection, which they make available for exhibitions and academia. They created
the Fundación Cisneros to promote Latin American art and culture. Their art and
education-related philanthropy began in the 1980s with a school for Venezuelan
musicians, and evolved in the 1990s into the foundation. Today 18 Caracas-based
staff members, including conservators, art historians and curators, tend to her
holdings: an Amazonian collection with more than 2,000 pieces; a colonial
collection with about 100 works; the geometric abstraction group with some 500
pieces; and a landscape collection Cisneros cannot quantify. Two or three
hundred of her works travel at any given time to destinations as far flung as
Japan and Sweden.
 | PATRICIA PHELPS de Cisneros, by Willys de Castro’s
Objeto Ativo, is one of the world’s most renown collectors of Latin American
art. (Photograph by Jason Dewey.) |
Although Cisneros has a broad mission, she also maintains a
highly personal relationship with the works she collects, insisting that she
loves every piece. Cisneros says that one of the advantages of being a private
collector is her option to pass on a work she doesn’t like, even though her
curators recommend it to complete a series.
Among her current favorites is a small conceptual minimalist
work, Objeto Ativo, by Brazilian Neo-Concrete artist Willys de Castro. Cisneros
showcased the piece last winter in an exhibition in Aspen. Would she keep
Objeto Ativo at home in New York for a time after its return? Cisneros
answers, "Absolutely. I can’t wait to wake up to it."
Catherine Curan is a senior correspondent for Worth.
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