Identity elements
Name and location of repository
Level of description
Collection
Title
Sofía Ímber collection
Date(s)
- circa 1940s-2022 (Creation)
Extent
16.80 linear feet (6 record storage cartons, 2 document cases, 3 flat archival boxes, and 2 flat files containing 30 oversized posters) and 189 GBs of digital content currently stored in two external hard-drives.
Name of creator
Biographical history
Sofía Ímber was born in Romania on May 8th, 1924 but moved as a child with her parents to Venezuela, where she became an influential journalist and intellectual. In addition to her work as a communicator on print media and on TV, she founded the Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas)(1).
Sofía got married to the writer Guillermo Meneses, and they had four children: Sara, Adrianna, Daniela, and Pedro. She accompanied Guillermo on diplomatic missions to Europe, and during the time they spent in France and Belgium, Sofía connected with a group of Venezuelan artists and intellectuals, “the dissidents”. Coming back to Venezuela years later, she got married to her second husband, Carlos Rangel, who was also a journalist.
Sofía’s influence flourished out of her writings. In fact, her essays reached not only Venezuela but were also published in Colombia, Argentina, and Mexico. She had a permanent column in the newspaper El Nacional, named Yo, la Intransigente, which was also the name of the anthology of her essays, published in 1971. Furthermore, Sofía directed the section dedicated to culture in the paper El Universal, but her most popular work was the TV show Buenos Días, which she produced and moderated with her husband, Carlos Rangel, until the year he passed away. Buenos Días featured a number of current internationally renowned intellectuals, including José Antonio Abreu, Vladimir Bukowsky, Gilberto Freyre, J.K. Galbraith, George McGovern, and Lech Walesa. The program provided a window into current social, economic, and political discussions through TV.
Her passion for communication extended to her love for making knowledge accessible, including the visual arts. She took advantage of the funds provided by the government during the oil boom in the 70s and acquired a number of art pieces and supported temporary art exhibits. Those efforts would then culminate in the creation of the MACC. Following her mission of providing bridges between the people and cultural expression, she kept entrance to the MACC free of cost. The museum also went mobile when its bus drove around the city taking books and videos to neighboring regions(2). Despite her social contributions, in 2006, Sofía and other Venezuelan intellectuals signed an open letter condemning Hugo Chávez, then president, for antisemitic declarations during Christmas 2005. Subsequently, she was removed as the director of the museum she herself had created(3).
Yet her career was marked by numerous prizes in and outside Venezuela. For example, she was the first woman ever nominated for the National Journalism Prize of Venezuela and subsequently won other awards including the Order of the Liberator General San Martín and the Picasso Medal from Unesco, the Argentinian “Orden de Mayo”, and the Brazilian “Ordem do Rio Branco”.
She passed away in 2017 at the age of 92.
–Vanessa Rodrigues Barcelos da Silva
Graduate Student Assistant for Manuscripts and Archives Management, Summer 2024
(1) Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sof%C3%ADa_%C3%8Dmber
(2) Tartakoff, Laura Y. "The Presence of Sofía Imber." Society, vol. 47, no. 1, 2010/01//, pp. 48-53. ProQuest, http://access.library.miami.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/presence-sofía-imber/docview/2176791774/se-2, doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-009-9272-z.
(3) Blackmore, Lisa. "Cultural Revolution." New Statesman, vol. 137, no. 4896, 2008 May 12, 2008/05/12/, pp. 42-43. ProQuest, http://access.library.miami.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/magazines/cultural-revolution/docview/224334915/se-2.
Name of creator
Biographical history
Name of creator
Biographical history
Guillermo Meneses (15 December 1911 - 29 December 1978) was a Venezuelan writer, playwright, and journalist. He graduated from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, majoring in Political Sciences, and worked as a state attorney and judge. However, he became nationally renowned primarily for his fictional writing and its screen versions. His short story “La Balandra Isabel Llegó Esta Tarde,” was adapted for the cinema and for TV under the direction of Carlos Hugo Christensen. He was the recipient of a number of prizes, including the Premio de Teatro de Caracas (1943) for the play El Marido de Nieves Márquez, the Premio Arístides Rojas (1952) for the novel El Falso Cuaderno de Narciso Espejo, and the Venezuelan National Prize for Literature (1967) for his whole body of work.
In addition to literature, politics played a significant role in Meneses’ trajectory. At the age of 17, he joined a student-led movement later known as the “Generación del 28,” in opposition to the military government of Juan Vicente Gomez (1931-1935). As a consequence, he was arrested along with other members of the group. His activist vein also manifested in his writings for the periodicals Élite, Sábado (de Colombia), El Nacional, and El Universal, and in his own magazine, Cubagua (1938).
Guillermo Meneses married the journalist Sofía Ímber in 1944, and they had four children: Sara, Adriana, Daniela, and Pedro. They left Venezuela to live in Bogota following the coup d'etat against president Isaias Medina in 1945, and the family soon moved to France in 1949, when Guillermo assumed a diplomatic position after being nominated by president Rómulo Gallegos. In the following years, during the regime of General Marcos Perez Jimenez, Meneses continued diplomatic service as secretary of the Venezuelan embassy in Paris and Brussels. There, Sofía and Guillermo became close to thinkers and artists, such as Picasso, Andre Malraux, and William Faulkner, in addition to Venezuelan expatriate intellectuals. As soon as General Jimenez’s regime came to an end, Meneses had his diplomatic post terminated, and the family returned to Venezuela. With a keen desire to share his ideas to a wider national audience, Meneses and Sofía created CAL (acronym for Criticism, Art, Literature) magazine in collaboration with the designer Nedo MF. The publication provided a platform for experimentation, combining the arts and thought in a Venezuelan context.
He eventually passed away at 67 years old in Caracas, Venezuela.
–Vanessa Rodrigues Barcelos da Silva
Graduate Student Assistant for Manuscripts and Archives Management, Summer 2024
Sources:
https://www.voanews.com/a/venezuelan-art-promoter-journalist-sofia-imber-dies/3733068.html
https://www.artnexus.com/en/news/5d5c2594c70855f6b9ef74b5/sofia-imber
https://www.venezuelatuya.com/biografias/guillermo_meneses.htm#
Gil, Diego Arroyo. La senora Imber: Genio y Figura. Editorial Planeta Venezoelana, 2016.
Name of creator
Biographical history
Content and structure elements
Scope and content
This collection currently contains several exhibit catalogs, mainly from the Sofía Ímber Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas Sofía Ímber), DVDs featuring interviews with Sofía Ímber and covering famous Venezuelan and international artists, politicians, and writers, CD-Rs, a collection of fliers from local photography exhibitions in Coral Gables, newspaper clippings of articles either about or by Sofía Ímber or Guillermo Meneses, oversized exhibit posters, and digital correspondence and photographs stored in external hard-drives.
There will be further ongoing accruals to this collection.
System of arrangement
This collection has been organized into the following series:
Series I: Exhibit catalogs (Contains catalogs from MACCSI, Museo Jacobo Borges, and other museums; also includes catalogs in Braille)
Series II: Periodicals and newsclippings (Newsclippings, magazines, newspapers, and scrapbook of newsclippings either by or about Sofía Ímber and Guillermo Meneses)
Series III: Audio-visual materials (DVDs of Venezuelan artists and interviews conducted by Sofía Ímber; 1 CD-R of pdfs)
Series IV: Photographs (Contains digital photographs, printed photographs, and photocopies)
Series V: Posters and promotional materials (Primarily from MACCSI exhibits)
Conditions of access and use elements
Conditions governing access
This collection is open for research.
Physical access
Items from this collection are kept on-campus and may be requested from the first floor Kislak Center in the Otto G. Richter Library at University of Miami. Please contact asc.library@miami.edu to request materials from this collection.
Technical access
Conditions governing reproduction
Sofía Ímber collection finding aid © 2022 University of Miami. All rights reserved. Permission to publish materials must be obtained in writing from Special Collections.
Languages of the material
- English
- French
- Spanish
Scripts of the material
- Braille
- Latin
Language and script notes
Finding aids
Acquisition and appraisal elements
Custodial history
Immediate source of acquisition
Gift from María Adriana Meneses Ímber, 10-15-2021.
Appraisal, destruction and scheduling information
Accruals
Related materials elements
Existence and location of originals
Existence and location of copies
Select exhibit catalogs from this collection have been digitized and can be accessed from our digital collections site.
You may access the virtual exhibit site on Sofía Ímber here as well as the Sofia Ímber subject guide here: https://guides.library.miami.edu/sofiaimber.
Related archival materials
The following books related to the collection will be entered into the UM libraries catalog:
Yo, la Intransigente by Sofía Ímber, 1971 Obras Ejemplares del Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas by José María Salvador, 1985 Colección Zona Tórrida, volumes 1 and 2 by Guillermo Meneses, 1992 Entrevistas Malandras by Nelson Hippolyte Ortega, 2010 Sofía Imber: Mil Sofía by Arlette Machado, 2012 (2 copies) La Señora Ímber by Diego Arroyo Gil, 2016
Related descriptions
Notes element
Specialized notes
- Citation: Sofía Ímber collection, Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables, Florida.
Alternative identifier(s)
Description control element
Rules or conventions
Sources used
Archivist's note
Finding aid created by Yvette Yurubi, Processing Archivist, 11-28-22.
Access points
Subject access points
Place access points
Name access points
Genre access points
- Video recordings (physical artifacts) » DVDs
- Catalogs (documents)
- Fliers (printed matter)
- Clippings (information artifacts)
- Posters
- Sound recordings » CD-Rs
- Scrapbooks
- Programs (documents)
- Periodicals » Newspapers
- Periodicals » Magazines (periodicals)
- Reproductions (derivative objects)
- Photocopies
- Photographs