On February 20, 1974, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas (MACC) was officially inaugurated, with Sofia Ímber as its first director. Ímber served as the museum’s director until Hugo Chávez removed her in 2001. 

Sofía Ímber was born in Soroca (in what is now Moldova) in 1924. Her parents and older sister Lya had fled antisemitism in Odessa in 1920, and in 1930 the family moved again to Venezuela. Lya became the first woman in Venezuela to earn a medical degree. Sofía enrolled in medical school too, but left after a year. In 1944, she met diplomat and novelist Guillermo Meneses, whom she married a month later. 

Meneses was the editor-in-chief of various publications, including Revista Élite (“Elite Magazine”), where Ímber began writing a social column. She continued to write and report as the couple moved to Bogotá, Colombia, and then back to Venezuela, possibly because she had controversially argued for the right to divorce. In Caracas, Ímber started spending time with the generation known as the “Venezuelan plastic artists.” 

Ímber’s interest in the arts expanded when Meneses was posted as a diplomat in Paris in the 1950s. Ímber built relationships with Latin American expatriates and local artists, and started collecting art herself. When the couple moved back to Caracas in 1959 with their four children, Ímber was appointed president of the National Association of Art Critics of Venezuela. 

The Venezuelan government had begun planning a small gallery for contemporary art in the early 1970s as part of its modernization efforts. After the government enlisted Ímber’s involvement, the museum plans grew into a 16,000 square-meter museum with exhibition spaces, a library, a design center, and spaces for workshops. 

Ímber ran MACC for 27 years, the first fourteen of which she was unpaid; while running the museum, she also hosted a variety of morning talk shows. In 1990, then-President Carlos Andrés Pérez renamed the museum “Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas Sofía Ímber” in her honor. “No tuve otro norte ni otra preocupación en mi vida que el museo” (“I did not have another North nor other preoccupation in my life other than the museum”), said Ímber.  

Ímber was a vocal critic of the Hugo Chávez presidency, and in 2001 he permanently ousted her from the museum. She continued to speak out in Venezuela and to collect art until her death in 2017. The museum ceased operations in 2021. 

Sources: 

Diario ABC. "Chávez destituye a Sofia Imber como directora del Museo de Arte de Caracas.” January 28, 2001. https://www.abc.es/cultura/abci-chavez-destituye-sofia-imber-como-directora-museo-arte-caracas-200101280300-8488_noticia.html. 

Johnson, Lourde. “The Legacy of Sofia Ímber, Venezuelan Cultural Icon.” ArcGIS StoryMaps, May 19, 2025. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/c42b800fe60e4e18970ef37aaeaa25aa  

Rangel, Gabriela. “The Zombie Life of Venezuelan Museums.” Hyperallergic, January 30, 2022. https://hyperallergic.com/707181/the-zombie-life-of-venezuelan-museums/.