Музеј наиве и маргиналне уметности

General information

Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art (MNMA), Jagodina, is a specialized institution, unique in our country, with a special program of museum protection of naïve and marginal art works by collecting, systematizing through the museum documentation, studying, exhibiting and publishing. It was founded in 1960 in Jagodina, firstly as Gallery of Self-Taught Artists. In 1985, the Museum was named Museum of Naïve Art to be later renamed as Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art in 2007. The Museum was founded by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia.
In the beginning, the Museum worked on systematical museum protection of the works of naïve art, primarily Serbian and Yugoslav, to which international works were added in 1994. Following modern trends, the Museum extended the scope of its protection to the domain of marginal art in 2000. MNMA has a delicate task to provide integral protection of naïve and marginal art, thus disseminating the true idea on its essence and real artistic value, separating it from other forms of non-academic work, the field of amateurism and dilettantism. The most significant result of long lasting efforts and activities of MNMA is the fact that many deep-rooted dilemmas and illusions about the specific field of naïve and marginal art have been explained. Nowadays, wider artistic audience is obviously more aware of the extraordinary artistic potentials, high artistic achievements and truly creative energy in the most valuable works. In addition, naïve and marginal art is properly viewed and evaluated as a constituent of contemporary, equal to academic art within the professional circles.
The Collection of MNMA is international in its character with more that 2500 works (paintings, sculptures, drawings and graphics) and about 280 artists from 1930s to the present day. There are the works from Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, the Republic of Srpska, Bulgaria, Hungary, Germany, Italy, Cyprus, Slovakia, Belarus, Sweden, Turkey and Brazil, among which are numerous representative works by our and worldly classics of naïve and marginal art such as Sava Sekulić, Ilija Bašičević Bosilj, Emerik Feješ, Bogoisav Živković, Vojislav Jakić…
In addition to representative permanent exhibition in 400m2 area, including the most significant works from MNMA collection, the exhibition activity of the Museum includes numerous independent, retrospective, group, thematic, study, international exhibitions in the Museum, other cities of Serbia and abroad. Since its foundation, the Museum has organized more than 400 exhibitions. Within its rich international cooperation, the Museum has organized numerous representative exhibitions (Lausanne, Martigny, Paris, Sofia, Budapest, Bratislava, Prague etc.). Museum also organizes significant international manifestations, Biennial and Colony of Naïve and Marginal Art, as one of the best ways to follow up, study and promote the development of naïve and marginal art in wider, international scope. The Museum also successfully participates in IN SITA, the prestigious worldly manifestation of naïve and marginal art in Bratislava, where the works selected by MNMA continuously achieve remarkable results.
Museum of Naïve and Marginal Art is a unique documentation center in this field of artistic creativity. Wealthy documentation resources, systematized in several units through research and archiving, including inventory book, card and photo catalogues, library, archives, CDs and DVDs, records of exhibitions and authors as well as electronic documentation serves as an important basis for professional work and research, study of naive and marginal art as a whole or in segments.
In addition to accompanying elements of exhibiting activities such as bilingual catalogues and other advertising materials (posters, invitation cards, picture post cards etc), publishing activity of MNMA includes other publications: monographs, miscellaneous collections, graphic maps, calendars. Since 2000, publishing activity is extended to issuing electronic editions.