Santa Cruz Museum Unites Scattered Works for New Tanja Tamvelius Exhibition
The Museum of Fine Arts of Santa Cruz de Tenerife has launched a collaborative exhibition on Swedish artist Tanja Tamvelius, utilizing public outreach to recover and showcase works previously held in private collections.
It is a major challenge for modern museums to showcase artists whose work has been scattered across private collections. However, the Museum of Fine Arts of Santa Cruz de Tenerife has found a creative solution through a collaborative research project. Their new exhibition, Tanja Tamvelius: Cartographies of Memory and Color (1914/1918–1969), which opened this Friday, not only explores the Swedish artist’s life but also sets a new standard for how public institutions can involve the community in uncovering lost history.
Supported by the Tenerife City Council’s Autonomous Organization of Culture (OAC), this project is part of a new initiative to highlight the museum’s own collections. Curators Katarzyna Zych Zmuda and Yolanda Peralta Sierra have mapped out Tamvelius’s creative journey across Estonia, Sweden, France, and the Canary Islands—the latter being where the museum holds two of her original pieces.
What makes this exhibition unique is how the museum tracked down the artwork. Because so much of Tamvelius’s work is held privately, the museum launched an open call on social media. Culture Councilor Santiago Díaz Mejías described this as a move toward greater institutional transparency, which successfully brought to light previously unseen paintings, along with historical archives, press clippings, and audiovisual materials.
The exhibition is open to the public until June 7. To mark International Museum Day, the museum will host guided tours on May 16 and 17. The project will conclude on June 4 with the launch of a new catalog, which will preserve the research and provide a formal, lasting analysis of an artist whose work has long been difficult for scholars to track.