In recent decades, art museums have focused on establishing a new identity and on presenting themselves not only as exhibition spaces but also as exhibition 'ethos': places where the work of art is contextualized and in dialogue with sample . Today's museum is characterized by its commitment to the generation of knowledge through multiplying approaches to understanding.

We are in the era of the 'slow museum', a museum that defends the interaction time between work and spectator, entering the artistic internship and using the museum as a space for meeting. Museums have the potential to be engines of knowledge, tractors and dynamizers. In final, all art has a public purpose and the mission statement of the museum is focused on presenting, analyzing and disseminating art. Museums disseminate their knowledge through exhibitions, visions of their collections, with parallel activities and interpretive programs, asking the question "what is (the) art" and what can we say about it, what can we learn from it.

The University Museum of Navarra, which begins to be built at the end of this year and will be inaugurated in autumn 2013, is born in this museum context. And its activity has already begun. While waiting for its own premises, it is finding new ways and places to begin to develop its research activity, professor and knowledge dissemination.

Our mission statement will consist of encouraging and developing the critical judgment of visitors through the creation of a heterogeneous, dynamic and contemporary artistic narrative. By its nature and approach university, we want the University of Navarra Museum to become a center of visual culture, open to the experimental, with a research vocation and professor, which also seeks to have an impact on society and thus provide it with a greater service.

Following the model of other areas of the University of Navarra such as science, management or communication, the Museum will be a unifying center, a platform that brings together experts in different disciplines, who act as multiplier agents of knowledge. Thus, the Museum will generate a dialogue between different fields of knowledge and will seek new perspectives that will enrich reflection on ideas and artistic symbols that will help to build the individual's critical capacity.

Its artistic programming will be based on the very important art collection donated in 2008 by María Josefa Huarte and on the University's internationally renowned photographic collection, which has been in existence since 1991, the fruit of a previous bequest, that of José Ortiz-Echagüe. The University Museum of Navarra will bet on a museum model that enhances the exchange between artist, work and spectator, presenting itself as an artistic playground, a place of meeting and participation, a place for the knowledge, thus following the express wish of María Josefa Huarte. The university character of the Museum offers the opportunity to create something exceptional in this sense, something new as a museographic paradigm, a space in which the transversal research facilitates a new vision on the art of our days.

The Museum's program will have a approach multidisciplinary where the program will be more than an artistic script until becoming an artistic metadiscourse, which will put the spectator in front of the fundamental keys of art through questions. The Museum adds to its program an auditorium, an element core topic through which we will be able to include the audiovisual arts in the artistic mission statement . A space with more than 700 seats will host academic events, artistic productions by university students and an artistic program that will enrich the content of the exhibitions through 'work&process' of artists, lectures, film series, concerts and dance.

In this sense, the Museum offers a great opportunity to place the contemporary arts at the center of the lives of university students, establishing a space in which they can form their critical and aesthetic judgment, contributing a great added value to their humanistic and scientific training .

It will have a corporate structure composed of 50 founding members through which an artistic programming and global museographic strategy will be established. The founding partner , in addition to financing the Museum, will participate in its strategic evolution through an active partnership in different crucial aspects: artistic, collection, technological and educational. All this mission statement will take place in the framework of an exceptional architectural work by Rafael Moneo.

The great museums of our era are characterized architecturally as dynamic ensembles, places where the spectator is confronted with the artistic, spaces in which -through a series of empathetic tricks- the visitor is led. The architectural design of the Museum of the University of Navarra stands as an artistic space of exchange, a space that is established as a public place and place of meeting between students and the city with art.

Museums show treasures, but art is more than a treasure; "art is an anecdote of the spirit" (Rothko) and museums should focus on facilitating the action of the experience to become another 'anecdote' on which to carve the training of aesthetic judgment staff. It is the search (the map) that matters. In fact, in the museum, the map, the path, is the treasure.