The Frac Bretagne, founded in 1981 by the National Government and the Brittany Regional Council, is a leading institution in the western region of France. Since 2012, it has been located in a building designed by the French architect Odile Decq in Beauregard park in Rennes.
About Frac Bretagne
Through an ambitious program of exhibitions, dissemination and documentation of the collection as well as numerous programs for the public, the Frac Bretagne’s artistic and cultural project, entitled “Making archipelagos”, aims to question the ways in which the institution can address the legitimate aspirations of our contemporary society. Inclusivity, diversity and openness towards other fields of discipline in Brittany and the rest of the world are important facets of its mission, developed through a horizontal and participative mediation policy, the inclusion of the Frac in international circulations, and its dedication to co-productions with other institutions. It is also committed to addressing gender equality and issues of eco-responsibility.
What’s a Frac ?
The Fonds régionaux d’art contemporain (Regional collections of contemporary art – Frac) are public collections of contemporary art created in the early 1980’s as part of a policy of devolution of power set up by the government via regional councils in order to ensure the presence of contemporary art in each region of France. Its primary mission is to create a collection and to display it in a way that engages audiences of all kinds, as well as to invent new ways of raising awareness of contemporary creation.
Today, the twenty-two Frac collections count more than 30,000 works from 5,700 French and foreign artists. For more than thirty years, the Fracs have been carrying out their mission to support young artists by being, in many cases, the first institutions to acquire their works. Frac structures include exhibition spaces and storage facilities, as well as areas for educational and documentary resources. Yet, unlike museums and art centres, Fracs are not limited to a single exhibition space. Their collections are essentially nomadic, marking the Fracs as uniquely original tools of pedagogy and diffusion whose collections are displayed both throughout France and abroad.
Every year, a third of the works are exhibited, making the Frac collections the most widely disseminated of all French public collections. This mobility defines them as essential players in a policy of cultural land settlement that aims to reduce geographical, social and cultural discrepancies by introducing contemporary art to a diverse range of audiences.
Image : Frac Bretagne, Rennes © Studio Odile Decq / ADAGP Paris. Photo credit: Jérôme Sevrette
