MAPA wants to celebrate its history through a commemorative exhibition, reconstructing the 1943 exhibition. On this occasion, 210 objects from its heritage collection will be exhibited, with techniques such as ceramics, textiles, carving, plaster, glass, beads and mixed techniques from the popular and indigenous world. Together with a series of manuscripts and emblematic exhibition catalogs from the Tomás Lago Archive, which reveal the historical importance of the MAPA at a global and local level.
The Museum of American Popular Art, Tomás Lago (MAPA), belonging to the Faculty of Arts of the University of Chile, celebrates seventy years of life this year since its opening on December 20, 1944 in the Castillo Hidalgo del Cerro Santa Lucía.
To reconstruct a history of MAPA, it is first necessary to go back to the milestones preceding its founding, anchored in a series of exhibitions of Chilean popular art curated by Tomás Lago - the museum's first director - between the 1930s and 1940s inside the National Museum of Fine Arts. The first of them was carried out in 1935, on the occasion of the V International Labor Conference. Later, in 1938, a second exhibition of Chilean popular art was held thanks to the help of the Intellectual Cooperation Commission. To culminate with a third exhibition in 1943, incorporating a series of Latin American pieces obtained from the embassies of Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Colombia, Paraguay, Venezuela and Guatemala, thanks to the efforts of Amanda Labarca, the first academic at the University of Chile, and Pablo Neruda. Exhibition of great value both for the museum and for studies of Latin American culture, given that a large part of the objects presented made up the collection of the first popular art museum in the world.