APEAL (Association for the Promotion and Exhibition of Arts in Lebanon) was established in 2008 with the express goal of nurturing and promoting artists from Lebanon within an international context.
Following a series of successful international exhibitions, APEAL has been dedicated to the establishment of a Modern and Contemporary art museum on a plot of land in the heart of Beirut.
With a design inspired by Italian campaniles and Arabic minarets, Beirut Museum of Art will feature a slender tower rising 124 metres into the sky, according to designs by the Lebanese-born New York-based Lebanese architect Amale Andraos.
The architectural competition jury was led by Lord Palumbo, the chairman of the Pritzker prize for architecture. It included Lord Rogers, the co-architect of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, as well as the late Zaha Hadid, the Iraq-born British architect.
The Museum will be built on a plot of land donated to APEAL by the Université Saint-Joseph (USJ). It is an exceptional site facing the national museum on the historically famous former green line of Beirut.
The future site will house a library, temporary exhibition spaces, artists in residence, and classes. It is said to operate independently, under its own governance.
The art will be drawn from 2,300 works from Lebanon’s contemporary era, including pieces by 470 Lebanese artists collected by the ministry of culture. According to The Guardian, the first exhibition is scheduled to open in 2020. One thousand works have been chosen to form the basis of the museum’s permanent collection.
With the help of the German embassy, the works that are currently hanging in Lebanon’s presidential palace and on the walls of government buildings will undergo cleaning before getting displayed in the new galleries at the base of the tower.
Beirut Museum of Art is envisioned as a multidisciplinary cultural hub highlighting modern and contemporary art from Lebanon and the region.