2023-06-05 20:00:49
The pools did not match. Manuel Segade, and not a woman, will be the new director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, replacing Manuel Borja-Villel. The current director of the 2 de Mayo Art Center (CA2M) in Móstoles was chosen by the Minister of Culture Miquel Iceta from among the final shortlist of candidates selected by the committee of experts after analyzing twenty applications for one of the most desired positions in the international contemporary art sector. Among the final nine candidates were five women and four men.
Segade will take the reins of the contemporary art museum for the next five years. Iceta must propose this Tuesday in the Council of Ministers the appointment of Segade (La Coruña, 46 years old), who has been in charge of CA2M since 2015. He has been the candidate with the highest score in a process that began last February.
Segade has a degree in Art History from the University of Santiago de Compostela. He has served as programming coordinator for the Metronom space of the Rafael Tous d’Art Contemporani Foundation in Barcelona and as chief curator of the Galician Center for Contemporary Art (Santiago de Compostela).
He has curated numerous exhibitions in national and international institutions, including ‘The question of the paradigm. Genealogies of the emergence in contemporary art’ in La Sala de la Capella in Barcelona; a monograph by the Spanish Lara Almarcegui or a double exhibition by the long-awaited Juan Muñoz. The first is still on the bill in the Alcalá 31 room in Madrid. The second will open on the 17th at the Móstoles museum.
As a teacher, Segade has excelled in the university and institutional sphere with the organization of national and international courses and seminars. He has been a Curatorial Tutor and advisor to the postgraduate program in curatorial training at l’École du Magasin at the Magasin Center National des Arts Plastiques in Grenoble (France). In addition, he has served as a professor in university programs in South Africa and Brazil.
He has published articles, catalogs and books, including ‘Narciso Fin de Siglo’, or ‘Las Infinitas Especies. It has several awards and distinctions, such as Una Gota MAV for CA2M, for its commitment to gender equality (2022) and a special mention in the CIMAN Outstanding Museum Practice Award, also for CA2M in 2021 for the projects developed in response. to the pandemic in 2020.
Segade is a founding member of the European Art Assembly, a meeting point for various European contemporary art directors and directors on urgent issues in contemporary art and a founding member of the European Forum For Advanced Practices, supported by the COST European Community network.
more candidates
The five women candidates were Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy (Mexicali, Mexico, 48 years old), former director of the Tamayo Museum in Mexico; Magali Arriola (Mexico City, 53 years old), current director of Tamayo; Viviana Kuri (Mexico City, 53 years old) who directs the Zapopan Art Museum (MAZ); Rosana Carrete (Montevideo, 54 years old), who has directed the Cabildo Museum of Montevideo since 2013, and the Italian Cristiana Collu (Cagliari, 57 years old), director of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome.
Among the men, in addition to Segade, the candidates were Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, 53, who was director and chief curator of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection and now adviser to the Venezuelan collector; Bartomeu Marí (Ibiza, 57 years old), philosopher and director of the Macba between 2008 and 2015, and Ferrán Barenblit (Buenos Aires, 56 years old), former director of two important contemporary art museums: the CA2M in Móstoles and the Macba in Barcelona.
The commission of experts that chose these applicants and the final shortlist was made up of Christophe Cherix, MoMA curator; Cuauhtémoc Medina, chief curator of the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC); Joanna Mytkowska, director of the Warsaw Museum of Art; Gloria Moure, former director of the Galician Center for Contemporary Art (CGAC), and María Nicanor, director of the Smithsonian Design Museum (USA).
poisoned inheritance
The new director of the Reina Sofía will receive a poisoned inheritance and an idle museum. Borja-Villel left his office on January 20, leaving the management in the hands of the deputy managing director, Julián González Cid, and the artistic deputy director, Mabel Tapia. In these months the activity has been almost nil. Only one temporary exhibition dedicated to the Susana and Ricardo Steinbruch Collection, patron of the Museum, is on the bill.
Segade will have to manage to maintain or reverse the latest and very personal rearrangement of the stable collection in which Borja-Villel has left his mark since 2021 with a direction that has been anything but calm. A speech that concludes today, with works alluding to the AIDS years, the Prestige catastrophe and includes the 15-M banners.
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