Art Basel’s ‘Meet the collectors’ film series celebrates today’s most inspiring patrons

Step into the Miami home of Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, a Cuban-born entrepreneur, philanthropist, and art collector whose life story weaves together exile, resilience, and a profound commitment to art. In this episode of ‘Meet the collectors,’ she opens up about her journey – from leaving Cuba in the 1960s to becoming a pivotal figure in the global art scene.

‘I was very young when we went into exile,’ she says in the film. ‘I was born in Cuba, and my parents decided to leave in the early days of the revolution, bringing us to a new country where we had to start all over again.’ Despite early aspirations to become an artist herself, circumstances led her down a different path. ‘When I was 15, I had to go to work,’ she recalls.

Success in business allowed Fontanals-Cisneros to return to her first passion. In 2002, she founded the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) in Miami, a platform dedicated to supporting Latin American artists. Her extensive collection features over 3,000 works, including pieces by Brazilian artists Anna Maria Maiolino and Mira Schendel, Venezuelan geometric abstractionist Alejandro Otero, and contemporary artists like Rashid Johnson. For Fontanals-Cisneros, art is a temporary stewardship rather than ownership. As she explains in the film, ‘In the end, we only keep things temporarily. We die, we leave this world, and the art moves into other hands.’