From Art Department to Acquisition Award: the beginning of the Drawing Cabinet

Abstract

This text was originally written for the opening of a new exhibition produce by a new institution of the City of Sao Paulo, dedicated to art and design: the Gabinete do Desenho (“Drawing Cabinet”). Initiative developed by the city government, through the mediation of Carlos Augusto Calil, Municipal Secretary of Culture, and the conceptualization of Agnaldo Farias, who organized the first two exhibition at the center. Farias also fits the “drawing” the commitment of the institution, its “purpose” (desí-gnio), within the complex cultural world of the state capital, proposing a thematic focus over the nearly two thousand works of City Art Collection that lights specifically those whose support is on paper: drawings and its variants. Agnaldo Farias remember the story of the collection, which started in 1945, as Section Art of the Sao Paulo City Library, through the Sao Paulo Cultural Center in the 1980s and that reaches the twenty-first century assuming the newly restored building (Chácara Lane), the Gabinete do Desenho will work within the activities of the Museum of the City of Sao Paulo.