Finally, it will not be any of the candidates and especially international candidates that sounded the most. The new director of the Reina SofÃa Museum, who will succeed Manuel Borja-Villel after his bitter departure, will be the Galician Manuel Segade (A Coruña, 1977), current director of the Dos de Mayo Art Center (CA2M) in Móstoles since 2015 , when he replaced Ferran Barenblit, who has just now been another of the candidates in contention to head the Reina. The Minister of Culture, Miquel Iceta, will propose Segade tomorrow in the Council of Ministers as the new director of the flagship of Spanish contemporary art for the next five years.
Segade has been the candidate that has obtained the highest score during the selection process and now he must take the complicated reins of an institution with closed rooms and semi-paralyzed after the march after 15 years at the helm of Manuel Borja-Villel, who finally decided not to apply to the new contest in the face of a fierce campaign by some media framed in the current culture wars.
In fact, the PP had asked today to postpone the appointment of the new director of the Reina SofÃa until after 23-J, but Miquel Iceta has indicated that having postponed the decision “would have been politicizing an appointment and this is a process that began on 10 February with an international committee of experts who made us a proposal and we opted for the person who has obtained the highest score, there is no greater guarantee of independence in the museum than this”.
Graduated in Art History from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Segade has served as program coordinator for the Metrònom space of the Rafael Tous d’Art Contemporani Foundation in Barcelona and as chief curator of the Galician Center for Contemporary Art in Santiago de Compostela. In addition, he has curated numerous exhibitions in national and international institutions for two decades, such as the one dedicated recently to Juan Muñoz in Sala Alcalá 31 of the Community of Madrid.
Segade has published articles, catalogs and books, including Narciso Fin de Siglo (Melusina) or Las Infinitas Especies (Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castellón). He has a special mention in the Outstanding Museum Practice Award from CIMAN to the CA2M Museum in 2021, for the projects developed in response to the pandemic in 2020.
The international jury that has chosen the five finalists among which Iceta has selected the one with the highest score, Manuel Segade, has been made up of the Swiss Christophe Cherix, chief curator of Drawing and Engraving at MoMA; the Mexican Cuauhtémoc Medina, chief curator of the University Museum of Contemporary Art of Mexico DF; the Polish Joanna Mytkowska, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; the curator and critic Gloria Moure, who was director of the Galician Center for Contemporary Art; and the architecture, design and urbanism curator MarÃa Nicanor, current director of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York.
