Museum of Contemporary Art and Design

The Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (Spanish: Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, MADC) is a Costa Rican museum founded in 1994 in San José, the nation's capital. It specialises in contemporary Central American art and design while also representing international work in the field. The museum occupies a significant position in the region's cultural landscape, serving as a platform for aesthetic, cultural, and social issues that affect Central America and the broader world.

The MADC was established in 1994, the same year that its host building complex underwent a radical restoration to become the Centro Nacional de Cultura (CENAC), under the Ministry of Culture and Youth of Costa Rica. The museum's early leadership included director Ana Luisa Piza Carrillo in 1994, followed by Virginia Pérez-Ratton from 1994 to 1998. Rolando Barahona directed the institution from 1999 to 2004, Ernesto Calvo from 2005 to 2008, and María José Monge from 2008 to 2009. Among curators, Rolando Castellón served from 1994 to 1998, Tahituey Ribot from 2000 to 2002, and Ernesto Calvo from 2002 to 2004. Since its founding, the museum has pursued a programme of individual and collective exhibitions by national and international artists, with competitions and shows in video creation, digital art, and emerging artists.

The museum's permanent collection contains more than 900 works by both young and established artists from national, regional, and international backgrounds. The collection spans a wide range of media, including painting, etching, drawing, sculpture, photography, installations, the intervened object, and video art. Selections from this collection are exhibited each year in the museum's galleries. The MADC's programming emphasises artists and curatorial visions related to aesthetic, cultural, social, and political issues affecting Central America and the world, contributing to the visibility of recent and adventurous trends in contemporary art and design in the region and their relation to international contexts.

While specific individual works are not catalogued in the available sources, the collection's strength lies in its diversity of media and its representation of both recognised and emerging voices in Central American contemporary art. The museum's video library holds particular significance, documenting exhibitions and video art from Central America and internationally. The documentation centre and video library together preserve a wide range of art catalogues, art books, and contemporary design books produced by the museum and other institutions.

The MADC is situated within the former Fábrica Nacional de Licores (FANAL), a complex of great architectural and heritage value founded in the mid-nineteenth century. The site originated on 2 September 1850, when Executive Decree No. 99, under President Juan Rafael Mora Porras, concentrated state control over alcohol distillation. The factory opened on 24 August 1856 and is considered the first industrial installation in Costa Rica and the oldest surviving building in San José. Early constructions between 1853 and 1856 included the west pavilion, distillation towers, the administrators' house, and the rum warehouse, built with limestone from Pavas and roofs of cedar and pochote wood. Later additions included brick walls during the government of José María Montealegre, and a neocolonial portal completed in 1943 by architect Teodorico Quirós. After radical restoration in the early 1990s, the complex became CENAC in 1994. The MADC occupies approximately 1,200 square meters within this historic site.

The museum is located in a significant historic zone of central San José, Costa Rica, within the CENAC complex. Its physical space includes four exhibition rooms, an auditorium, the open-air Pila de la Melaza for performances, installations, and other events, and El Tanque, a former bunker tank used by FANAL to feed boilers. Additional facilities include a small sales area, a Documentation Centre, and a Video Library. The museum offers guided tours, conferences, talks, discussions, art workshops, and international video-cinema screenings incorporating performance, video, and music. Permanent consultation services are available to artists, specialists, and the general public through the Documentation Centre and Video Library. The museum's website provides information about spaces, exhibitions, parallel programmes, collection images, catalogues, videos, podcasts, and seminars.