Franck Riester, Minister of Culture, has appointed Béatrice Salmon as director of the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP). She took up her duties on 1er november 2019.
Béatrice Salmon served as Director of FRAC - Fonds régional d'art contemporain de Bretagne (Rennes), Plastic Arts Advisor (DRAC Centre), Artistic Creation Inspector (Ministry of Culture), and curator at the Cabinet d'art graphique du Musée national d'Art moderne - Centre Pompidou. Director of the Musée des Beaux-arts de Nancy and then of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Paris), she was able to conduct large-scale renovation projects there. She was also a cultural and scientific advisor at the Embassy of France in Belgium (Brussels) for 4 years. Béatrice Salmon was Deputy Director in charge of Visual Arts, in the Artistic Creation Directorate of the Ministry of Culture since January 2018.
The National Centre for the Visual Arts is the operator of the Ministry of Culture which acts in the field of the plastic arts and design. He manages the National Fund for Contemporary Art. Béatrice Salmon will implement the project to relocate the CNAP to a single site in Pantin by 2022 that will bring together the services and the reserves of the collections that will be partially shared with those of the Mobilier national. Through a policy of deposits and loans, its collections are intended to be available to all audiences in all territories, in France and internationally. The new building, designed by the BRUTHER and DATA agencies, will also be open to all visual arts professionals.
The CNAP offers various creative support mechanisms that are aimed at artists, but also at all actors in the field: gallery owners, curators, critics, researchers, publishers. With its cnap.fr website, it is also an important resource centre for the entire visual arts ecosystem. Béatrice Salmon’s project for CNAP aims to continue these actions by giving them the greatest visibility. With more information available, more expertise, more meetings, it aims to make the CNAP an increasingly public service that listens to all stakeholders.
Franck Riester would like to commend the decisive action of Yves Robert in the management of the CNAP who actively contributed between 2014 and 2019 to the design of the relocation project of the establishment in Pantin. Yves Robert’s mandate is also marked by a wide distribution of the collection, particularly in the context of major partnerships in France and internationally.