It houses 40 legacies of Latin American artists

Artistic heritage: an association is born to protect the legacies of 40 masters of Latin American art

It is called the Association of Legacies of American Modernity (ALMA).
It houses 40 legacies of Latin American artists, ten of them Argentine.
Its mission is to protect, manage, promote, and disseminate the work of artists such as Leonora Carrington, Carlos Mérida, and Ennio Iommi.
With the incorporation (to date) of 40 legacies, 10 of them from Argentina and belonging to Latin American artists, including Leonora Carrington (Mexico), Carlos Mérida (Guatemala), Rodolfo Abularach and Elmar Rojas (Guatemala), Carlos Cruz Diez (Venezuela), Lucy Tejada and Omar Rayo (Colombia), Enrique Tábara (Ecuador), Mariano Rodríguez (Cuba), Emilio Rodríguez Larraín (Peru), Enrique Arnal (Bolivia), Magda Frank, Ennio Iommi, Eduardo Mac Entyre, Miguel Ángel Vidal, and Miguel Ocampo (Argentina), the Association of Legacies of American Modernity (ALMA) was born, with the mission of protecting, managing, promoting, and disseminating the work of these creators and protecting the rights of their heirs and legatees. The association is also made up of various foundations, curators, cultural managers, and lawyers specializing in art. Honorary members include artists in their nineties, but still in full production, such as Ecuadorian Olga Dueñas, Argentine César Paternoso, and Chilean Mario Toral.

For two of ALMA's founders, who also lead the association—Ecuadorian Eduardo Tábara, president of the Enrique Tábara Cultural Foundation, and Guatemalan Ximena Fernández Abularach, the heir of her uncle Rodolfo Abularach—an association of this kind was necessary to jointly address a series of challenges common to all legacies, such as defending the legitimacy of the works of the masters in circulation, preserving and enhancing the archives, and maintaining, in some way, the network of friendship and collaboration that the artists themselves once maintained among themselves. An Argentine, the architect of the idea

Argentine academic and curator Rodrigo Gutiérrez Viñuales, based in Granada, shares the same view. He is, in many ways, the architect of this idea. He proposed it in 2010 at a meeting promoted in Cali by Colombian collector Alberto Otero, founder of the Fundación Arte Vivo Otero Herrera, which included artists such as Rodolfo Abularach and Elmar Rojas from Guatemala, and Omar Rayo and Pedro Álcantara from Colombia, as well as several Cali-based creators and art critics.

In 2023, Eduardo Tábara, who had attended that Cali meeting representing his father Enrique Tábara, along with Ximena Fernández Abularach, would consider bringing the idea to life when they met in Madrid for the opening of the exhibition Before America: Original Sources in Modern Culture, curated by Gutiérrez Viñuales.

A first step was to partner with Ojo Vulgar, a Latin American cultural magazine published in Paris, to publish monographic issues dedicated to Abularach and Tábara in 2024, as part of the centenary celebration of the first Surrealist manifesto. By then, they had already begun to shape the future ALMA, launching the call for proposals and recruiting new legacies.

The purpose of ALMA, which brings together legatees chosen by mutual agreement among the artists' families, is also to consolidate a network of cooperation between heirs, institutions, museums, and cultural entities, ensuring the preservation, study, and dissemination of Latin American artistic heritage for future generations.

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