A free day and four more hits to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Miró Foundation.

BarcelonaFifty years ago, when the brand-new Fundació Joan Miró on Montjuïc was due to open its doors, the artist decided against an official inauguration. To avoid the presence of Franco's authorities, he held a day open to the public, featuring elements of popular and festive culture. This joyful, open-to-all spirit is what they hope to revive on Sunday, June 15th, a day that will mark the beginning of the foundation's fiftieth anniversary. It has been christened with the motto For the people of tomorrow because it paraphrases a wish of Joan Miró who, since 1968, had a clear idea of what he wanted his foundation to be: "It's very important to make it a living place, to think about the person of tomorrow." Miró did not inscribe his name on the entrance door, but rather the initials CEAC: Center for the Study of Contemporary Art. "Miró leaves us not only a building, not only an institution, a magnificent collection, but also a way of looking at the world," says Daniel. ~BK_S_

On June 15th, from 6 a.m., you will be able to enter the building designed by architect Josep Lluís Sert for a four-hour, uncrowded visit (reservation required). The Sert Solstice is the moment when the first sun of the day allows the building's shutters to be raised, which preventive conservation requires must be kept closed the rest of the day. The last sun of the day will bring a concert by flamenco guitarist Yerai Cortés, in a concert in partnership with Sónar. At a time of maximum controversy and cancellations due to the festival's links to pro-Israeli fundsMarko Daniel has argued that this artistic collaboration "has nothing to do" with the "questionable connections" of Sónar and has defended "the festival team, its vision and a compelling, avant-garde and innovative artistic program." Throughout Sunday, visitors will be able to experience the Miró Foundation for free and participate in all the activities: storytelling, workshops with artists such as Pilarín Bayés and Marta Altés, screenings, and a performance by Jaume Clotet that kicks off the series. Reincarnations and even a castellera performance.

It will also be an opportunity to visit the new retrospective exhibition on the history of the foundation entitled Poetry has only just begun. 50 years of Miró, which will open on Wednesday the 11th. The exhibition is not made up of Miró paintings but rather reproductions of archival materials, primarily photographs, documents, and posters. Located on the first floor, it reconstructs the journey from the foundation's earliest inception—which the curators date to the 1920s with the friendship between Joan Prats and Joan Miró, the ADLAN group, and the exhibition's participation in the Spanish Pavilion of the Republic in 1937—through Miró's reconciliation with Barcelona from 1968 onward, showing the 1968s, and extending to the artistic collaborations of recent years. In fact, artists such as Lúa Coderch, Anna Moreno, Àngels Ribé, and Antonio Ortega have participated in the conceptualization of each room. The result is a puzzle that seeks to connect with the center's experimental spirit.

The great exhibition of the year, as announced at the end of 2024, will be held in October and will feature world-renowned guests. Miró and the United States will offer a journey that will show the relationship between Miró and around forty artists of the post-war American avant-garde - half of them women - and the impact that his seven trips to the country, from 1947 to 1968, had on his work and on his projection and on the art of the 20th century. 160 works by artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. The exhibition, co-organized with The Phillips Collection, will travel to Washington in 2026.

The Fundació Miró will redesign its permanent exhibition in March 2026. The new itinerary will highlight the artist's creative processes. "We will emphasize the finished work but also the process; we will try to place the visitor in the moment when Miró painted the works," explains Ana Ara, director of the Artistic Department, who points out that the artist worked "with oil paint and with space, thinking about the architecture" of the foundation. Furthermore, this renovation will include a new space in the itinerary, the Jardí dels Xiprers, until now inaccessible to visitors, which will reopen in 2026 as a space for exhibitions and activities, as planned by Sert i Miró.

The fiftieth anniversary year will close with an exhibition by an increasingly recognized name in the contemporary art world, Kapwani Kiwang, who won the ninth Joan Miró Prize and will have his first solo exhibition in Spain at the Foundation in April of next year. The artist focuses on memory, history, and power structures, using archival research to defuse and rethink hegemonic narratives that have defined reality since colonization.

The Miró Foundation will deploy a broad public program throughout the fiftieth anniversary year that will encompass all the arts, also following Miró's precepts: music, performance, young cinema, and art. It will feature reciprocal collaborations with cultural entities such as the Liceu, the Palacio de la Música, the MNAC, the MACBA, the Reina Sofía, the Brossa Foundation, the Escocesa Foundation, the Grec Festival, Sónar, Sâlmon, and Peralada. "The Foundation was born from an act of generosity by Miró and only makes sense in relation to the public. The fiftieth anniversary is an invitation to come, participate, return, ask, discover, and search with us," says Marko Daniel.