Museo de Arte de Ponce
Exterior view of the museum
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 Museo de Arte de Ponce
Location within Puerto Rico
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| Established | 1959 |
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| Location | Ponce, Puerto Rico |
| Coordinates | 18°0′14″N 66°37′1″W / 18.00389°N 66.61694°WCoordinates: 18°0′14″N 66°37′1″W / 18.00389°N 66.61694°W |
| Type | Art museum |
| Accreditation | American Alliance of Museums |
| Key holdings | -Flaming June -The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon |
| Collections |
Baroque Pre-Raphaelite Golden Age Latin American art Puerto Rican art |
| Collection size | 4,500 pieces (2010) |
| Visitors | 90,000 (2010) |
| Director | Alejandra Peña Gutiérrez |
| President | María Luisa Ferré Rangel |
| Owner | Private: Fundación Luis A. Ferré, Inc. |
| Public transit access |
SITRAS, "Linea Anaranjada" (Orange Line): Buses E, F, G (Museo stop) |
| Website | museoarteponce |
Museo de Arte de Ponce (MAP) is an art museum located on Avenida Las Americas in Ponce, Puerto Rico. It houses a collection of European art, as well as work by Puerto Rican artists. The museum contains one of the most important Pre-Raphaelite collections in the Western Hemisphere, holding some 4,500 pieces of art distributed among fourteen galleries.
Museo de Arte de Ponce is considered one of the finest art museums in Puerto Rico. The largest art museum in the Caribbean, it has also been called one of the best in the Americas. It was the first museum in Puerto Rico accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.
It was founded in 1959 by industrialist and philanthropist Luis A. Ferré at a location in the Ponce Historic Zone. The museum moved to its current building location on Avenida Las Americas in 1965. In 2010, the museum increased its size significantly after a $30M expansion.
The project of the museum began in 1956 when Luis A. Ferré traveled to Europe and acquired various European art pieces, including many pre-Raphealite works, which encouraged him to start a project for a museum in the city of Ponce, his birthplace. With the advice of two experts – Julius S. Held, specialist on Rubens and professor of Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University, and René Taylor, art and architecture enthusiast and professor at the University of Granada, Yale, and Columbia – Ferré compiled a collection of works of art based on their value instead of their popularity. Ferré would state in a Forbes interview that "the scholars and critics all called it kitsch, everyone thought I was crazy to buy them."
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