Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

Patricia "Patty" Phelps de Cisneros is a Venezuelan-born Dominican arts and education advocate. Since the 1970s Cisneros has led initiatives to expand access to educational and cultural resources, including large scale literacy and teacher training programs across the region. She is also recognized for her work as an art collector, with a particular focus on Latin American modernist and contemporary art from Brazil, Venezuela, and the Río de la Plata region of Argentina and Uruguay. Along with her late husband, Gustavo A. Cisneros, she founded the New York City and Caracas-based Fundación Cisneros, which launched several educational and cultural programs. In the 1990s the Fundación's primary art-related program became the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. In 2016, Cisneros donated 102 modern and contemporary artworks from the 1940s to 1990s to the Museum of Modern Art, establishing the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.