Casa integrates Portuguese Network of Contemporary Art

RPAC – North (Portuguese Network of Contemporary Art) is an initiative promoted by the Northern Regional Directorate for Culture, with the support of Tourism of Porto and Northern Portugal, and co-financed by community funds, which involves 11 cities in the north: Amarante, Bragança, Chaves, Gondomar, Guimarães, Matosinhos, Porto, Santo Tirso, São João da Madeira, Vila Nova de Cerveira and Vila Nova de Famalicão.
The goal of this initiative is to promote tourism in the regions of Porto, Douro, Minho and Trás-os-Montes. There are 13 museums and centres of contemporary art and architecture in the North region that currently make up the RPAC – North and that will make known more than 11 thousand works of art, available in those cities.
Casa da Arquitectura, Casa do Design, Graça Morais Contemporary Art Centre, Oliva Art Centre, José de Guimarães International Centre for the Arts , Cupertino de Miranda Foundation, Serralves Foundation, Marques da Silva Foundation, Lugar do Desenho – Júlio Resende, Foundation, Cerveira Biennial Museum, Chaves Museum of Contemporary Art – Nadir Afonso, International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture and Amadeo Souza-Cardoso Municipal Museum are the 13 entities involved in this network.
The network is coordinated with the promotion of the State’s Annual Programme for the Acquisition of Contemporary Art, created in 2019, through which works by national artists were acquired and integrated. RPAC was constituted in 2021, through a Resolution of the Council of Ministers. The diploma, published in May 2021 in Diário da República, defines it as a dynamic platform that will promote the interaction of 120 institutions scattered across the country, already identified. In the diploma that creates the RPAC and the figure of curator of the Contemporary Art Collection of the State (CACE), the Government emphasizes that “after almost 20 years, a public policy for the acquisition of contemporary art works has been resumed, which privileges national creation and its enjoyment throughout the territory”, through the establishment of the Commission for the Acquisition of Contemporary Art, and the allocation of an annual budget within the scope of the Portuguese State contemporary art acquisition programme.

With Lusa