PONCE, PR.- Works on paper make up a fascinating, fragile and largely unknown part of the Museo de Arte de Ponce’s collection, comprising around 2,500 drawings, prints and photographs – mostly twentieth-century Puerto Rican and Latin American. In the next months, they will come to the fore through an ambitious and overarching plan thanks to the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This prestigious award will greatly support the museum’s mission at a time of dire financial circumstances on the island.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation began collaborating with the Museo de Arte de Ponce in 2011, when its Board of Directors approved a grant to help establish a paper conservation department in Ponce. Now, a $500,000 grant will further improve the museum’s stewardship over its collection of works on paper. Cheaper and more accessible for artists than painting, sculpture or any other media, paper has played a central role in the development of modern and contemporary art in Puerto Rico. The island can also boast a rich tradition of print- and poster-making, with distinguished practitioners such as Lorenzo Homar, Myrna Báez and Antonio Martorell (all of whom are amply represented in the Ponce collection). With its hot and humid climate, however, conditions on the island are far from ideal when it comes to preserving this important artistic legacy.

With the new grant, the Museo de Arte de Ponce will offer two thirty-month fellowships for additional qualified staff to work in paper conservation beginning in January 2017. They will carry out a complete assessment of the condition of works in the collection to determine if any treatments are needed to guarantee their integrity, and will also ensure that they are kept in the best possible conditions with only state-of-the-art materials and storage facilities. Prior to that, the Curatorial team and an external consultant will carry out some preliminary housekeeping duties, such as weeding out duplicates, memorabilia, and other items according to the Museum’s 2016 Collection Management Plan. “This step is vital to help us maximize our efforts and look after the collection as a whole more efficiently”, points out Executive Director Alejandra Peña Gutiérrez.

“The collection of works on paper stands out for its extraordinary richness and diversity”, comments associate curator Pablo Pérez d’Ors. Represented in the collection are drawings in traditional media such as pencil, ink, charcoal and watercolor, as well as photographs and a variety of printing techniques like engravings, lithographs, linotypes, silkscreen and offset prints. Besides more recent Puerto Rican and Latin American artists, the collection also contains a few European works from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries – Edward Burne-Jones’s preparatory sketches for The Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon, one of Leighton’s studies for Flaming June, as well as works by Albrecht Dürer, Thomas Lawrence and Gustave Doré, among others.

The project would contribute to the Museum’s objectives of caring and strengthening the collection, developing and engaging audiences, and further developing and advancing in-depth scholarship on the collection. Moreover, it will reinforce the Museum’s capacity to better serve its community.