About
The Moreira Salles Institute is a unique institution in the Brazilian cultural landscape. Has important assets in four areas: Photography, on a wider scale, Music, Literature and Iconography. Also is notable for promoting art exhibitions of Brazilian and foreign artists. And like Cinema. Its activities are supported by an endowment, originally set up by Unibanco and later expanded the Moreira Salles family. Present in three cities - Pocos de Caldas, in southeastern Minas Gerais, where he was born in 1992, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo - IMS, in addition to exhibition catalogs, books, photography, literature and music, regularly publishes the magazines ZUM, about contemporary photography in Brazil and the world every six months, and saw, and testing ideas, quarterly.
The preservation, organization and dissemination of its collections, the IMS has immense tasks. The Photography takes care of 800,000 images, the most important testimonies of the nineteenth century - and here the splendid pictures emerge Marc Ferrez - the relevant collections that span almost the entire twentieth century. These last, it is worth noting names such as Marcel Gautherot, José Medeiros, Maureen Bisilliat, Thomaz Farkas, Hans Gunter Otto and Flieg Stupakoff, among others. And it is a priority of the Institute incorporate their collections pictures of the XXI century. This formidable array - 40 collections, with 19 complete works of photographers - accredits IMS as the most important institution of photography in the country.
Music gives an account of the early recordings of Brazilian songs. The collection is crammed with disks at 78 rpm, a repository of 80,000 phonograms, whose underpinnings the priceless collections of Joseph and Humberto Ramos Tinhorão Franceschi. But there are also collections from three seminal composers which enrich Brazilian musical fortune - Chiquinha Gonzaga, Ernesto Nazareth and Pixinguinha.
Letters, papers, documents and many books make up the collections of Literature. Personal archives of Otto Lara Resende, Erico Verissimo, Clarice Lispector, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Rachel de Queiroz, Lygia Fagundes Telles, Paulo Mendes Campos, among others, deserve the attention of researchers with valuable information and enrich the knowledge about the literary activity in country.
Prehistory of Photography, Iconography IMS, all she expresses on paper (watercolors, prints, drawings), precious record is mostly done by our artists who came to Brazil aboard diplomatic or specifically cultural expeditions in the nineteenth century. Highlights of this collection are the beautiful watercolors of English Charles Landseer, who arrived here in 1825, and the designs of the German Von Martius (Carl Friedrich Philipp), who explored the Brazilian nature between 1817 and 1820.
The fundamental goal of IMS is to spread these collections to the fullest extent. This requires enormous previous work of cleaning and scanning of images and sounds, and cataloging their best to serve the exhibitions and publications and meet other researchers and consultants. But it goes beyond. The IMS has perfected and renewed its internet address (ims.com.br) to propagate agile and free your holdings and your schedule. An internet radio, the Radio Baton gives rise to the collection of music and produces documentaries about great composers and interpreters.
The idea of Walther Moreira Salles to create a cultural nonprofit germinated and took the body in a relatively short time. To plant foundations and give countenance to the IMS, was indispensable work of Antonio Fernando De Franceschi, first superintendent, who directed the IMS for almost 16 years. Installed first in Pocos de Caldas, taking advantage of a remarkable chalet Italian trait, since 1999 IMS occupies the house was the residence of the Moreira Salles family in Gávea, Rio de Janeiro. Landmark of modern architecture of the 1950s, the house, designed by Olavo Redig de Campos, is surrounded by lush garden designed by landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx in the field of 11 thousand square meters.
Now the IMS projects into the future with new challenges. And the first one is the construction in São Paulo a new museum on Paulista Avenue, the heart of the city and important cultural corridor today. Designed by the architectural firm Andrade Morettin, the new museum will have large exhibition spaces, a cinema / auditorium, and a reference library in Photography, classrooms and spaces for workshops. Besides raising the ambitions of the IMS in the field of exhibitions Photography and Visual Arts, the museum will take to Sao Paulo activities that have marked the life of the cultural center of Rio de Janeiro, such as film showings, lectures, courses and concerts.
Amassing, organizing and disseminating knowledge since its inception, IMS also wants to generate knowledge from their collections. In this sense, has sought to establish agreements and exchanges with Brazilian and foreign universities and with other museums. Research goal is to be followed going forward.
Memory is in almost everything that IMS does. Be guardian of the past is the most noble mission. A past that does not stay stagnant, but is also crucial to understand the present and face the future. In the best inspiration of its history, the IMS wants to build cultural legacies. This is what has been devoting.
Flávio Pinheiro, executive superintendent of IMS
