Sevillano serves as a key reference for both Spanish and international professionals in the field of cultural management, thanks to his management strategy at one of Spain’s most important and solvent private foundations for art – namely, the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation. Dalí created the foundation in 1983 and remained its director until his death in 1989. Ten years later, Sevillano was installed as manager under the direction of Ramón Boixadós and since then he has worked hard each day to fulfil the founder’s wishes: to promote, protect, care for and share his legacy with the world.
Today, the four museums that comprise the foundation are located in small towns on the Costa Brava. However, this has not prevented their worldwide renown from growing even more, thanks to the commitment of the managerial staff to promoting the legacy and figure of Salvador Dalí on the global stage. In Sevillano's own words, “culture is international”.
He illustrated this policy of internationalization by highlighting the different exhibitions of Dalí’s work that have been held around the world. “The Rio de Janeiro exhibition in 2014, for example, was the most-visited art exhibition in the world that year. Nearly one million people came to see it; more than those who came to see it in France, at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, or in Spain, at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid”, Sevillano explained. “We don’t just manage Dalí’s tangible, material legacy, but also his extraordinary intangible legacy: his brand, ideas and the copyright and publishing arrangements for his many pictorial, audiovisual and written works, such as his autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí”, he continued.
Sevillano explained how the foundation’s current economic solvency is the result of many different factors, including the gradual increase in the number of visitors. In 2014, for example, around 1.5 million people came to visit the foundation, a figure that also highlights the difficulty of managing the large number of tourists who not visit the foundation over the course of the year, as well as the city of Figueras, which has a population of just 40,000. He then went on to talk about “the multiplier effect of culture” and the economic impact the foundation has had on the surrounding area. “According to a study by the Universitat de Girona’s Faculty of Economic Sciences, the foundation has created 1,865 indirect jobs”, he revealed.
Over the course of this master class, Sevillano covered a wide range of interesting topics and gave a comprehensive overview of the management of this foundation, while providing insight into its history, origins and evolution over the last 16 years of his tenure as manager. “In terms of results, the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation is now one of the most important and solvent foundations in Spain and a benchmark of cultural and economic profitability among professionals in the field of cultural management”, he concluded.
