Instituto Moreira Salles, Brazil

The Instituto Moreira Salles, also known as the IMS, is a non-profit organization founded in 1990 and managed by the Moreira Salles family. Its goal is to promote the development of cultural projects mainly in five areas: photography, literature, libraries, visual arts and Brazilian music.

The Instituto Moreira Salles is a singular institution within the Brazilian cultural scene. It holds important assets in four areas: photography, with the bulk of material, as well as music, literature, and iconography. The Instituto has also gained renown for its exhibitions, highlighting visual arts by artists from Brazil and abroad; and it has a soft spot for cinema.

The IMS’ activities are supported by a donation initially provided by Unibanco and later added to by the Moreira Salles family. With sites in three cities – Poços de Caldas, in the southeast of the state of Minas Gerais, where the Instituto was born 20 years ago; Rio de Janeiro; and São Paulo – the IMS releases exhibition catalogues, books of photography, literature, and music, in addition to ZUM Magazine, dedicated to contemporary photography in Brazil and around the world, and serrote, a quarterly publication of essays and ideas.

Part of its photographic, literary, and musical database is available through its website. It has cultural centers around Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Poços de Caldas and Belo Horizonte), and four galleries (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba e Porto Alegre).

It is distinguished from other private cultural institutions in Brazil and abroad. One reason for that is its intervention practices; it basically focuses on initiatives that the institution already executes and provides. Another reason is that it conducts short and long-term projects, going away from short-sighted events as well as developing regular projects that educate and inform the public.

Another important feature of this institution is that it is located in three different states in Brazil, building a network of integrated cultural centers that work in different geographical and cultural areas with a unified goal.

It often works together with the Unibanco Cinemas|Espaços Unibanco de Cinema/Unibanco Arteplex, being the biggest private conglomerate dedicated to cultural activities in Brazil.

Some characteristics differentiate IMS from other private cultural institutions in Brazil and abroad. One of them concerns its direct form of intervention: in contrast to the practice of traditional patronage, the institution prefers to act fundamentally in initiatives that it itself conceives and executes. Another factor that distinguishes the work of Instituto Moreira Salles is the priority it grants to medium- and long-term projects, which means escaping the fugacity of events by developing regular programs aimed at training and improving the public.

The Moreira Salles Institute has a distinguished work in the field of photography, with emphasis on the formation of collections and preservation of rare collections that deal with issues related to the memory and history of the country, communications and the visual arts.

Its photographic collection began to be constituted in 1995, through collections of images of Century XIX. Following this, the institute acquired the collection of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, from the 1930s.

Currently, the collection consists of about 2 million images [8], by the following photographers: Augusto Malta, Alberto Henschel, Albert Frisch, Alécio de Andrade, Alice Brill, Augusto Stahl, Carlos Moskovics, Chico Albuquerque, Claude Lévi Strauss, David Drew Zingg, Domingos de Miranda Ribeiro, Dulce Soares, Francisco du Bocage, Georg Leuzinger, Guilherme Gaensly, Guilherme Santos, Hans Gunter Flieg, Haruo Ohara, Henri Ballot, Hercules Florence, Hildegard Rosenthal, Horacio Coppola, José Medeiros, Juca Martins, Lily Sverner, Luciano Carneiro, Madalena Schwartz, Marc Ferrez, Marcel Gautherot, Martín Chambi, Maureen Bisilliat, Militão Augusto de Azevedo, Otto Stupakoff, Peter Scheier, Revert Henrique Klumb, Rossini Perez, Stefania Bril, Thomaz Farkas and Vincenzo Pastore .

In 2016, the IMS also acquired the photographic archive of the Diários Associados group, which, in the course of the 20th century, under the command of Assis Chateaubriand, was one of the largest media conglomerates in the country. With the acquisition, IMS incorporated into its collection the photographic collection of the Rio de Janeiro periodicals O Jornal, created in 1919; Diário da Noite (Rio de Janeiro), founded in 1929; and Jornal do Commercio, created in 1827, incorporated into the Associated Diaries in 1957 and published until April 2016.

In the new IMS of Avenida Paulista, the institution will also maintain a library entirely dedicated to photography, with a capacity for up to 30,000 items.
https://hisour.com/exhibition/instituto-moreira-salles-brazil/