Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo

The Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, commonly known as MEIAC or the Ibero-American Museum of Contemporary Art, is a contemporary art museum located in Badajoz, the capital of Extremadura in western Spain. Founded in May 1995, the museum occupies a historically layered site that combines a 1950s prison structure with older military foundations, and it maintains a collection focused on artists from Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. Its role as a regional institution with an explicitly transatlantic, Ibero-American scope distinguishes it within the Spanish museum landscape.

The museum opened on 9 May 1995 under the inaugural directorship of Antonio Franco Domínguez, who would lead the institution for nearly twenty-five years until his death on 26 January 2020. The project had originated in 1989 with plans drawn by architect José Antonio Galea, drawing on precedents in Latin America where prison and institutional buildings had been successfully converted into museums, including the Museo Nacional de Colombia and the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico. Franco Domínguez was succeeded as director by Catalina Pulido Corrales, who had previously served as conservator at the museum. The founding responded to a desire to establish a major contemporary art venue in Extremadura while engaging with the broader Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American cultural sphere.

The museum's collection comprises approximately 1,475 works spanning modern and contemporary art, with a deliberate geographic focus on three interconnected regions: Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. This Ibero-American orientation reflects historical and linguistic ties across the Atlantic and positions the museum as a bridge between European and Latin American contemporary art contexts. The collection also incorporates works by artists from other European, American, and Asian backgrounds, as well as figures associated with Extremadura itself, creating a collection that is regionally anchored yet internationally oriented.

Among the works in the collection are pieces by filmmakers, collectives, and individual artists of considerable reputation. These include filmmaker Luis Buñuel; the collective el Equipo 57, known for its geometric abstraction; Daniel Canogar, recognized for his media and light installations; sculptor Miquel Navarro; painter Eduardo Naranjo; photographer Ouka Leele; media artist Daniel Garcia Andujar; Gustavo Romano; Juan Barjola; and Pablo Palazuelo, noted for his abstract geometric work. The collection also represents regional Extremaduran artists such as Victoria Gil, born in Badajoz in 1963.

The museum building stands on a site of successive historical layers. Its immediate predecessor was the Pretrial Detention and Correctional Center, constructed in the mid-1950s according to plans by architect José María de la Vega Samper. This prison was built on the grounds of the 17th-century Fort of Pardaleras, an 18th-century military bastion. The prison followed a panopticon model, with a central cylindrical pavilion topped by a concrete dome from which radiating galleries extended, distributed among various courtyards and surrounded by a double wall. During the 1970s, under the Law of Dangerousness and Social Rehabilitation, the facility functioned as a forced labor camp for homosexuals and transgender people from across Spain, one of several such institutions including a similar center in Huelva and the earlier Tefía penal colony in Fuerteventura. The prison was abandoned toward the end of that decade, and a new facility was constructed outside the city. Architect José Antonio Galea's 1989 design for the museum preserved the distinctive central cylindrical pavilion with its concrete dome, integrating this surviving prison architecture into a new museum function. Aerial photographs of the demolished prison record its original layout.