by • Observer.com – A private art organization in Beirut has big plans for the city’s downtown: Come 2020, the area will become home to the city’s largest art museum. The Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation has announced plans to build a 10,000- to 15,000-square-meter institution to house its 4,000-piece Modern and Contemporary Arab art collection, reports the Art Newspaper. An exact location for the new Beirut Arab Art Museum is still being determined, but the institution is one of three new arts institutions—along with the Beirut City Museum and Beirut Museum of Art—slated to open in the city in the near future. The Dalloul collection primarily comprises paintings but also includes photography, sculpture, ceramics and video, and works by artists such as Etel Adnan and Mona Hatoum. Along with exhibition spaces to display the Foundation’s substantial collection, the museum will also host temporary exhibitions and create education, research and conservation programming on Arab art. “Our collection is quite unique in its quality as well as its diversity,” IT entrepreneur and managing director of the Dalloul Foundation Basel Dalloul told the Art Newspaper. “We look forward to educating and inspiring generations to come, not only from the region but the world over.” While the free museum won’t open for several years, the Foundation will be lending artworks to exhibitions at foreign institutions in the interim ( the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Madrid’s Reina Sofia and London’s Tate Modern), publishing digitized versions of its collections online and hosting pop-up shows around the city.
