The Jesús Soto Museum of Modern Art (Spanish: Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto) is a museum of modern art in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela. It is named after the kinetic artist and sculptor Jesús Rafael Soto, who was born in Ciudad Bolívar. The museum, which opened in 1973, is a late work of the Venezuelan modernist architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva. It contains 350 works of art, by a variety of artists, including Soto. History In 1959, Jesús Rafael Soto won Venezuela's National Prize for Plastic Arts; at the ceremony he announced his intention to start a museum in his hometown, Ciudad Bolívar, but it was only in the late 1960s that he began donating artwork to the city. The donation in about 1969 included a large amount of property and pieces that were representative of his various artistic periods. The government in Ciudad Bolívar welcomed Soto's proposal, as it had no cultural institutions at the time, and in 1968 offered the neoclassical Casa Wantzelius in the city center for the museum. Architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva, whose experience creating the art-infused University City of Caracas campus made him the ideal candidate to design an architectural space for housing art, first drafted a plan to renovate the Casa Wantzelius before it was discovered that the building was too damaged to proceed. In 1969, the state governor gave Soto and Villanueva an area of land between the old and new towns. This also allowed more originality in Villanueva's design. The museum, which covers , was constructed over a period of only nine and a half months in 1971; Soto visited the fresh site on 21 February, and the completion was announced on 4 December. The museum is located at the intersection of Germanías Avenue and Mario Briceño Avenue. It is one of the buildings in the New Cultural Center planned neighborhood. The III biennial "Pueblos en Resistencia" was held in the museum in 2019. Design Soto was good friends with Villanueva, who, in his later career beginning with the Venezuelan pavilion at the Montreal Expo in 1967, "tried to formulate architecture of essential features, of the greatest refinement and simplicity". Villanueva in this period felt that buildings were meant to hold things, and wanted to create buildings "without anything useless [...] and so pure that there is no longer an appreciable difference between roofs, walls and natural spaces." One of the buildings of