Missions

The decision to create French Regional Collections of Contemporary Art (Frac) in 1982 was ground-breaking. The result of an unprecedented partnership between the French State and its Regional authorities, the Frac were established to bring the art of today to every region of France, often in areas far from major urban centres.

It was in this context in 1982 that the Frac des Pays de la Loire was created.

The Frac des Pays de la Loire is innovative in more than one way: since 1984 it has been welcoming artists in residence within the framework of the International Workshops. In addition, the Frac has a restoration workshop intended to become a real resource center in preventive conservation. A rich documentation of 13,000 works and a collection of artists’ books, allows work with the public.

The Frac was first established at the Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud and was then hosted in 1988 in the neoclassical villa of Garenne-Lemot in Clisson. In 1994, the Frac moved temporarily to Nantes in a former converted warehouse and the City of Saint-Nazaire also hosted the International Workshops. Finally, in 2000, it was the first to be equipped with a building specifically designed for its missions in Carquefou, in the Nantes metropolitan area. The architecture, the design of which was entrusted to Jean-Claude Pondevie, offers pure volume with elegant simplicity.

The entire collection, assembled over nearly forty years, reflects the diversity of contemporary creation and brings together practices as diverse as painting, photography, sculpture, drawing, video, performance, installation. The collection is now oriented around different axes that have asserted themselves over the years. Thus the Frac paid special attention to artists questioning the relationships between the work and its context (political, social …), the work and its environment (heritage, architectural, natural …), modernity and the links between art, architecture and design, but also autobiography, performance and interest in the body.

In Carquefou, from 2020, the Frac is highlighting exhibition projects around works from its collection. Developed at the pace of an annual exhibition, the program carried out at Carquefou enables new avenues of reading and interpretation of the collections to be updated. Until 2019, in Carquefou, the Frac invited emerging artists, some of whom have exhibited in France for the first time, notably as part of the Ateliers Internationaux and Instantanées.

In the region, among the many projects that it presents in partnership with various places in the departments of Loire-Atlantique, Maine-et-Loire, Mayenne, Sarthe and Vendée, the Frac implements each around twenty exhibitions throughout the region, in cultural institutions, educational galleries in schools, etc.

In Nantes, in the summer of 2021, the Frac opened a second venue on the site of the former shipyards. Three exhibitions are presented each year, showcasing works created specifically for these invitations, as well as pieces from the collection viewed through the lens of artist-led curatorships.

From 2007 to 2019, the Frac benefited from the use of the Hab Galerie, located on the same site. Each of these exhibitions contributed to an unprecedented level of visibility for the Frac and its collection, while fostering richer and more diverse partnerships across the region.

The Frac’s Nantes venue closed in April 2025.

The public sector actively supports the projects set up by the Frac on Carquefou site but also throughout the region.

Each year, it works with schools, colleges and high schools in the five departments of the region. In the classroom, he exhibits his collection, lends boxes of videos, books or artist’s games and coordinates practice workshops with artists. These actions, the content of which is the subject of work with teachers, aim to be linked to the programs and to be defined according to class or school projects.