Guggenheim and UBS Project Plan Cross-Cultural Program In an effort to reach beyond the Western art world the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation is embarking on a five-year program to work with artists, curators and educators from South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa. In addition to bringing curators from those parts of the world to the Guggenheim Museum in New York and organizing exhibitions that highlight art from their regions, the program will acquire art for the Guggenheim's permanent collection. The project, to be financed by UBS and called the Guggenheim UBS Map Global Art Initiative, will begin with South and Southeast Asia. The museum will invite a curator from each region to New York for overlapping two-year residencies; they will work with a team of Guggenheim curators to identify new and recent artworks that best reflect the range of talents in their areas. The artworks they choose will be acquired for the Guggenheim and will also be the focus of exhibitions that open at the New York museum and then travel to two other cultural institutions. Guggenheim officials are currently in discussions with museums in Singapore and Hong Kong about taking the first show. The exhibitions will be supplemented with a series of public and online programs based on the theme of cross-cultural exchange. "We are hoping to challenge our Western-centric view of art history," said Richard Armstrong, the director of the Guggenheim Foundation. Our global aspiration is to become familiar with these places, but that calls for people power and a sense of adventure. We certainly have the latter. For UBS, the big Swiss bank, which has long supported the arts, the initiative is a way of taking its cultural branding program beyond the familiar environs of fairs like Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, as well as institutions that it helps support like the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. "As art is becoming more and more of an asset class, UBS is looking to increase our profile in these kinds of special fields of interest," said Jürg Zeltner, the chief executive of UBS Wealth Management. More and more we are refocusing our strategy to reach emerging markets, and this project seemed like a perfect fit. Officials at the Guggenheim and UBS have signed confidentiality agreements prohibiting them from disclosing how much money UBS has agreed to pay for the project, including the art acquisitions. People in the art world put the figure at more than $40 million. That would be the largest investment UBS has made in an art initiative, and the biggest such project the Guggenheim has ever taken on. For the first phase of the project a committee of arts experts put together by the Guggenheim has selected June Yap to be the curator for South and Southeast Asia. Ms. Yap, 38, lives in Singapore and has worked for six years in the curatorial departments of modern and contemporary art museums, including the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore and the Singapore Art Museum. Most recently she organized an exhibition of the work of Ho Tzu Nyen for the Singapore Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Ms. Yap has already started her residency in New York, where she is working with curators at the Guggenheim to finalize the geographic parameters of her project. Countries under consideration are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam. Once she decides her focus, she will begin to select artists and works. Her exhibition is scheduled to open in New York next winter. The second and third phases of the project will focus on Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa. Specifics about these initiatives will be announced in the coming months, Guggenheim officials said.