Every institution has a story that precedes its final name. In the case of Arts Connection Foundation, that story begins in Caracas in 1996, with an idea as simple as it was radical: that artists should not have to face the act of creation alone.
30 YEARS OF THE FAE
That year, Andreína Fuentes Angarita—a Venezuelan artist, museologist, and cultural manager—founded the Emerging Artists Foundation (FAE), a non-profit organization conceived as a direct response to the lack of infrastructure and support for young creators in Venezuela. The FAE did not offer traditional grants or prizes; it offered accompaniment. It helped artists produce their exhibitions, find spaces, and make possible what would have otherwise remained unexamined. In exchange, many of them donated works or services to the foundation—a model of solidarity-based exchange that, without fully intending to, began building the first layers of what is now the Fuentes Angarita Collection.
The FAE was much more than a production platform. It was born during a time of deep political and economic upheaval in Venezuela, and its programming reflected this from the start. The foundation supported artistic proposals critical of migration, censorship, gender identity, and the collapse of political utopias. It opened doors, with a special emphasis on historically marginalized communities—including the LGBTQ+ community—in a cultural environment that frequently turned its back on them. For Andreína, art was never a purely aesthetic matter: it was always a way of exercising rights, generating awareness, and resisting.
As the Venezuelan crisis worsened from 1999 onwards and the cultural climate hardened under growing political pressure, sustaining this work became increasingly difficult. In 2006, Andreína made the decision to emigrate with her family to the United States. The FAE closed its doors in Caracas—but not its spirit.
20 YEARS OF ARTS CONNECTION
That same year, from Miami, she founded the Arts Connection Foundation (ACF): the continuation of the FAE in a new territory, born from the condition of the diaspora and with an international perspective. ACF inherited the founding values—solidarity among artists, socially committed art, and the inclusion of marginalized voices—and projected them into a broader ecosystem. It incorporated artists from across Latin America and other regions, launched educational and community programs, and formalized the collection of works that the FAE had begun gathering nearly a decade earlier.
In celebrating 20 years of Arts Connection Foundation, it is impossible to understand what the institution is today without recognizing where it came from. The FAE was not a minor predecessor; it was the laboratory where an entire philosophy was forged regarding the role of art in society, the responsibility of the cultural manager toward their community, and the possibility of building institutions out of scarcity and urgency. That philosophy remains at the core of everything ACF does today—from its cultural mediation programs to its international alliances, and from the preservation of the Trans Queer Archive to its presence in institutions in Spain and France.
Twenty years after the journey from Caracas to Miami, the seed planted in 1996 has grown into something that Andreína perhaps never imagined in its full dimension: a living network of more than 150 artists, over 1,500 preserved works, and a foundation that continues to believe—with the same conviction as back then—that art is not a luxury. It is a tool. And sometimes, it is also a way of existing.