Museo de Arte de El Salvador

Museo de Arte de El Salvador (MARTE) is a private, nonprofit institution in San Salvador, dedicated to preserving and promoting Salvadoran art from the mid-19th century to contemporary times.

Planning your visit

MARTE is El Salvador's principal art museum, a private non-profit opened in 2003, and it holds the national collection of Salvadoran art from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

The twentieth-century material is where the interest lies. Salvadoran art passed through indigenismo, social realism, abstraction and conceptual work, and it did so through a period including the 1932 massacre of tens of thousands of peasants and Indigenous people, and the civil war of 1980 to 1992 — history that runs through the work whether directly or by omission.

The museum has handled that engagement carefully in a country where the war's memory remains contested.

Temporary exhibitions and international shows supplement the permanent collection.

It sits in the Zona Rosa near the anthropology museum.

Bookable options include tours combining MARTE with the National Anthropology Museum. Current availability is listed below.