The CIAJG’s mission is conceived within this framework: to be diverse, inclusive and plural. To build audiences, create critical sensibilities and meanings. Participate in the cultural and social development of the local territory. Be a place of transformative experiences. Preserve, research and disseminate its collection. Welcome the gazes and discourses of visitors and those who occupy it. Observe the narratives of art, expressions of artistic thought and production. Refound the museum as a place for speech and listening, as a redesigned topography of fictions and untold stories

Since its inauguration in 2012, the CIAJG has established itself as an experimental and discursive cultural project, that presents reflections on its collections, based on continuous critique of the idea of a museum. The CIAJG is a multipurpose structure at the service of the local, national and international communities.

ABOUT THE COLLECTION

The CIAJG’s collection comprises a set of works by the artist José de Guimarães, as well as African art, pre-Columbian art and ancient Chinese art, selected by the artist. In total, the CIAJG collection contains 1,128 objects, including pottery, sculpture, drawing, installation, textiles, painting and graphic arts.

The objects of African art, pre-Columbian art and ancient Chinese art were acquired by José de Guimarães between the 1980s and 2000s in the European market that specialises in artistic, archaeological and ethnographic objects. They have been entrusted on loan to the CIAJG and serve as the basis for its artistic programme. The selection of works by José de Guimarães aims to represent the sixty years of his overall career in the fields of painting, sculpture/installation and the graphic arts.

Unlike scientific or anthropology museums, the choice of objects in the CIAJG collection corresponds to José de Guimarães’ sensibility as an “artist-collector”, who has been inspired by them, continually reworking a syncretic vocabulary of cultural references from different parts of the world.

More than a heritage collection, subject to the immobility of historiographical cataloguing, the CIAJG aims to explore cross and critical perspectives related to its collection and render visible the broken links between objects and narratives and their respective peoples of origin. One of the CIAJG’s missions is to study the archive in the context of its respective communities and the histories of the collection, placing them more broadly within the history of the overall circulation of ethnographic objects between Europe and Africa, in particular in the 20th and 21st centuries.