Featured Events in Santiago in February 2025 (July Updated)

Norman Foster (British, b. 1935), is one of the most esteemed international architects of our time, with projects worldwide. Among innumerable accolades, he was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 1999. This installation focuses on models and designs for a select few of his many celebrated projects, organized into three themes: Working with History; Embracing the Environment, and Community and Culture. All these subjects are underpinned by sustainability, and crucial to Foster + Partners’ vision for an upcoming renovation of The San Diego Museum of Art west wing.

Printmaking has played a central role in the development of the visual arts in modern Mexico, from early devotional engravings of the 1600s to the satirical lithographs of José Guadalupe Posada around 1900. The Muralist movement was inspired by Posada’s “calaveras” (animated skeletons), the Virgin of Guadalupe, and other Christian and nationalist images made popular in prints. Closely intertwined with the advancement of democracy, human rights, and Indigenous cultural identity, printmaking became the primary medium of political engagement in Mexico. Throughout the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), and World War II (1939–45), printmaking was at the forefront of art and politics in Mexico.

Dutch photographer Ruud van Empel (b. 1958) asks us to look at the world as if for the first time. Hovering between reality and artifice, his photographs offer an impossible density of detail and intensity of color. Van Empel creates these pictures over hundreds and even thousands of hours, constructing them digitally by combining fragments of photographs he makes himself, a collage technique he has explored since the mid-1990s. The final pictures are imaginary, almost hallucinogenic illusions that celebrate nature’s wonders yet also stress its perpetual conflict in crowded spaces where elements vie for visual priority.

Impressionist advances in technique (light grounds overlaid with dabs of distinct color) and a taste for “modern” subjects (including new forms of popular entertainment) were new and shocking when first exhibited in Paris in 1874. The influence of this French school would be strongly felt by painters, especially in Paris, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term Post-Impressionist was coined in 1910 to characterize this legacy.

“Although the result is obtained by chemical means, the little work it entails will greatly please ladies.” So wrote one of photography’s inventors, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), about his eponymous daguerreotype in 1839. Daguerre’s words, which associate women with idleness, are clearly misogynistic. Yet in a backhanded way, Daguerre predicted the pivotal role women would play in photography since its invention in the 1830s. Undaunted by photographic chemistry—and often neglected or derided by their male peers—women have made huge contributions to the development of the medium across a variety of genres.

“Although the result is obtained by chemical means, the little work it entails will greatly please ladies.” So wrote one of photography’s inventors, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), about his eponymous daguerreotype in 1839. Daguerre’s words, which associate women with idleness, are clearly misogynistic. Yet in a backhanded way, Daguerre predicted the pivotal role women would play in photography since its invention in the 1830s. Undaunted by photographic chemistry—and often neglected or derided by their male peers—women have made huge contributions to the development of the medium across a variety of genres.

In the heart of the Andes, colonial textiles weave a story that transcends time and space. Their beauty, technical sophistication, and diversity of uses and materials both conceal and reveal processes of cultural transformation and redefinition during the colonial period. The exhibition Contacts: Colonial Textiles of the Andes presents works that illustrate the effects of colonization and interbreeding, and highlights the role of textile art in shaping Andean society between the 16th and 19th centuries. By offering the public a collection of pieces of extraordinary value, the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art seeks to show that these contacts were more than a simple encounter between Spaniards and Indigenous peoples. In colonial America, these contacts were complex, involving imposition and resistance, sometimes violent and sometimes creative, generating a new social, political, and cultural reality. Colonial textiles are a testament to this and reflect Andean creativity. They are the result of the introduction of new materials, tools, and techniques, along with the preservation of a rich Indigenous textile tradition. These works, which interweave designs from diverse origins, not only capture the reality of this period but also celebrate the resilience and rich Andean cultural heritage that endures through the centuries.

Modern Women celebrate the arrival of twenty works of art to the Museum on indefinite loan from a private collection. The art presented in this gallery is a testament to the imagination, experimentation, and fortitude of women artists who have enriched the world with their creations. The variety of work on view spans scale, media, and artistic approach—from gestural painting and innovative sculpture to meditative prints and drawings. Testing the limits of subject and media, the works of art are as varied and complex as the rapidly shifting centuries in which they were executed.