Who are we? - Frac Centre-Val de Loire

What is the Frac? Our missions A museum to rebuild reality Team

What is the Frac?

The Fonds régionaux d’art contemporain (Frac), created in 1982 on the basis of a State-Regions partnership, are institutions whose mission is to build up public collections of contemporary art, to disseminate them to all audiences and to invent forms of awareness of current creation. Since 2017, the Frac have been awarded a label by the Ministry of Culture, crowning years of artistic and professional commitment to the general interest.

It constitutes recognition, protection and a sign of trust. This label secures the collections and enshrines the Frac’s fundamental missions of support for contemporary creation, transmission and mediation for access to contemporary art by the widest possible audience.

The Frac Centre-Val de Loire is one of the so-called “second generation” regional contemporary art funds which, at the beginning of the 2010s, acquired major infrastructures to develop their dissemination and awareness-raising missions.

A few dates

1982

Creation of the Fonds Régionaux d’Art Contemporain on the initiative of the Ministry of Culture in partnership with the regional councils

1983

Creation of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire

1997

Director: Marie-Ange Brayer

1999

1st edition of ArchiLab, international architecture laboratory in Orléans, on the site of the Subsistances militaires, by M.-A. Brayer and F. Migayrou

2004-2005

Expositions consacrées à la collection, Mori Art Museum de Tokyo

2006

International competition for the rehabilitation of the Subsistances militaires site and the establishment of the Frac Centre-Val de Loire
Winning architects: Jakob + MacFarlane
Co-winners: Electronic Shadow

Exhibitions dedicated to the collection, Barbican Art Gallery, London

2008

Collection exhibitions, Fine Arts Museum, Taipei

2013

Inauguration of Turbulences – Frac Centre-Val de Loire and the 9th edition of ArchiLab
30 years of the FRACs

2015

Director: Abdelkader Damani

2017

First edition of the Orléans Architecture Biennial

2018

Exhibition at the Bruges Triennial

2019

First edition of the Rabat Biennial of Contemporary Art

Second edition of the Orleans Architecture Biennial

2022

Third edition of the Biennale of Art and Architecture in Vierzon

Frac Centre Val-de-Loire © Martin Argyroglo

Les Turbulences FRAC Centre - ∏ Jakob + MacFarlane -N Borel Photo - 650

Les Turbulences, Frac Centre Val-de-Loire © Martin Argyroglo

Our missions

The missions of the Frac are to build up a collection of contemporary art, focusing on current creation, its dissemination and awareness-raising in the regions, in France and abroad.

Each year, the Fracs distribute several hundred works from their collections “in motion” through loans, which are major vectors of their awareness-raising activities.

Each Fonds régional d’art contemporain thus weaves a unique network of partners and dissemination and awareness-raising activities at the regional, national and international levels, which for thirty-five years has contributed to cultural development and the emergence of new territories.

In 1991, the institution oriented its collection towards a transversal questioning, an open field of reflection on the architecture of tomorrow by bringing together contemporary art and experimental architecture from 1950 to the present day.

The Frac Centre-Val de Loire’s collection now represents ninety-four artists and architects. It includes some one thousand architectural models, one thousand artists’ works and more than sixteen thousand drawings. It is endowed with
exceptional collections, thanks to numerous donations.

A museum to rebuild reality

The Frac Centre-Val de Loire’s project is to reach out to the public, to develop an inclusive policy within a logic of social investment and to define itself as an institution that participates in providing public policies and citizens with a way of thinking about the world we live in.

The Manifesto

Consider the Frac Centre-Val de Loire as a laboratory of feminist democracy
Deeply feminist. Unconditionally feminist. A democracy that allows us to reflect daily on the fundamental question worth asking: that of women’s liberty.

Rewrite history from inclusive points of view, taking into account the geographic and anthropological dimension of narratives
We will not write our history of Europe alone in a “continent-all” perspective. Europe is the culmination of narratives from around the world, and our history of art, of images and of architecture come to us via Africa, the Americas, the Arab worlds, Asia and beyond.

Defend the right to experimentation
The Frac Centre-Val de Loire is at the service of artists and architects—their space for doubting and daring to take paths that branch out. We do not expect artists to give us answers, but to roam for us in the infinite field of questions.

Redefine our relationship with audiences
It is urgent to advocate not for rising attendance, but to the contrary, for diminishing the prominence of this objective. A radical change of perspective: welcoming in smaller audiences, but welcoming them with hospitality and kindness. This is the main lesson that care workers have taught us recently. We need to spend more time with our visitors, accompany them, talk to them, listen to them, get to know them.

Build public space
The Frac Centre-Val de Loire needs to become a space of possibilities, an agora in which anything can be said. One of the most urgent matters of our time is the disappearance of places for speech, expression, debate, disputation. To rebuild reality must become a space for our contemporary disputations, involving audiences, artists and architects, works and politics.

Affirm equivalency in intelligence and fight the hierarchy of diplomas or knowledge accumulation
Audiences must become actors in programming and activities. They are the new curators in the wake of new commissioners.

Welcome foreigners in, with the fundamental implications this has for our identity
Seek out networks beyond the world of culture: Cultures du Coeur [national association at the center of social transformation through culture], Planning Familial [popular education feminist movement], the Teranga association [social guidance], ASELQO centers [Orléans-based social, educational and leisure activities], COJIE [collective supporting isolated foreign minors], etc.

Impacting the world
The Frac Centre-Val de Loire cannot remain deaf to the cries of reality. The lack of reaction from cultural institutions at the time of the migratory crises, to give just one example, creates a sense of having become fortresses impervious to the “fragile skin of the world” (Jean-Luc Nancy).
It is our responsibility to contribute, hand in hand with public authorities and citizens, to repairing—in the sense used by Kader Attia—societal divisions.

Construct the world
Through its specificity, as a collection of art and architecture, the Frac Centre-Val de Loire is a tool at the service of public policies for territorial development. Each work at the Frac is an idea awaiting activation at the service of constructing forms of living together. A Frac (regional contemporary art collection) is not a temple for the sanctification of works, but a space of expertise to create our world one day at a time.