Faena Arts Center

Faena Art Center is the cultural center of the Faena District Buenos Aires, a residential and cultural community on the Puerto Madero waterfront in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Founded by Alan Faena and opened in September 2011, the center occupies a converted industrial building that once served as one of Argentina's first large flour mills. Under the leadership of Executive Director Ximena Caminos, the institution has functioned as a venue for international and Argentine contemporary art, though its public programming has been significantly reduced in recent years.

The Faena Art Center does not maintain a permanent collection in the traditional museum sense. Rather, its identity has centered on temporary exhibitions and commissioned projects that foster dialogue between international contemporary art and the Argentine scene. The Faena Prize for the Arts exemplified this approach, requiring artists to create site-specific projects that responded to the center's distinctive architectural space. The prize was open to all artists worldwide and accepted work across multiple media, including installations, performances, paintings, sculptures, photographs, design and architecture, film, video, and interdisciplinary combinations.

The center's most significant projects have been exhibition-based rather than collection holdings. The inaugural Ernesto Neto installation established the venue's scale and ambition. Prize-winning projects included Franco Dario Vico's 2013 site-specific work, produced with a $25,000 grant and up to $50,000 in production funding, and Cayetano Ferrer's 2015 installation Cinema Architecture, which received $75,000 total including $50,000 for production in the Sala Molinos. Other notable exhibitions included El-Aleph by Mischa Kuball and Anthony McCall in 2013, Richard Long's Textwork Mendoza Walking and sculptures Pampas Dreaming and Piraña Andes in 2014, and Augustina Woodgate's GPS/Geometría Poética Social in 2014.

The Faena Art Center is housed in the former Molinos de la Plata, one of Argentina's first large flour mills. The building's old machine room was converted into the main exhibition space, preserving original details from the 1900s. The structure features soaring ceilings, semicircular arches, bay windows, and other hallmarks of turn-of-the-century industrial architecture. The center encompasses more than 4,000 square meters of space. Puerto Madero itself was developed from a former port area that declined after the harbor was relocated, with redevelopment beginning in the late 1980s and transforming the district into one of Buenos Aires's most sought-after areas for residential, office, and entertainment use.

The Faena Art Center is located in Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires, Argentina. It forms part of the Faena District, a residential and cultural community developed by the Faena Group on the Puerto Madero waterfront. The center's official website is maintained at faena.com. Visitors should note that the center currently does not offer open public exhibitions, a significant change from its active programming in the early 2010s when it regularly presented works by both international and local artists.