Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, TEA, is more than a museum. Inaugurated before the end of 2008, the project was ges-tated 13 years ago. It hosts an uncommon library, a significantly historied photography center, and new museum space (the Instituto Óscar Domínguez); the TEA continues to challenge the patterns of the world¿s best contemporary art centers. It is also a key urbanism work for the historic and cultural center of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the cradle of a decisive section of Spain¿s Surrealist movement. Since October 31, 2008, Tenerife has an ambitious and strategic space for the arts, which undoubtedly brings its capital, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, up a rung in the international cultural circuit. Already the year 2003 witnessed the opening of the Auditorio de Tenerife, an emblematic architectural work designed for the city by Carlos Calatrava, and five years later the Swiss studio of architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron inaugurated new urban interventions in the Canary Islands city: the remodeling of Plaza España and the TEA. A Historic Debt Art in Tenerife is supported by a solid historical platform at whose center is an avant-garde movement whose expression was felt in the 1930s not only on the island but across the most demanding cultural borders, serving as a guiding light in the art world at the time. Gaceta del Arte (38 issues between February, 1932 and June, 1936) was one of the key journals for the Spanish and European avant-garde, edited by Eduardo Westerdahl with a team of high intellectual renown that in-cluded Domingo Pérez Minik, Pedro García Cabrera, Domingo López Torres, Óscar Pestana, Emeterio Gutiérrez Albelo, and Agustín Espinosa. The journal published valuable contributions by Le Corbusier, Gertrude Stein, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cassou, Herbert Read, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, and others. This was a time when the Canary Islands and several of its natives were points of reference for the international art world. Óscar Domínguez, a Canary native with long sojourns in Paris, is at the forefront of a significant Surrealist legacy, alongside painters and writers like Juan Ismael, Emeterio Gutiérrez Albelo, Pedro García Cabrera, Domingo López Torres, and Agustín Espinosa. These are the years when the celebrated Exposición Surrealista was presented at the Ateneo in Santa Cruz de Tenerife (May of 1935), with the presence of French Surrealists invited by the Gaceta de Arte team, who after their fruitful meeting on the is-land published a French-Canary Surrealist manifesto in he Bulletin International du Surréalisme. All of this memorializing points to one of the debts owed by the present to the past in recognition of its important specific valence, and in retribution today with a space for Tenerife to pay tribute to the basis on which it was built, which are none other than those of universal art and its social projection as a sensitive, critical, and revelatory thermometer of the times. In that sense, the TEA wants to be a space for the avant-garde, as well as one dedicated to the recognition and diffusion of Óscar Domínguez¿s work, around which several points of view branch out that integrate the work of so many other art-ists with a certain affinity. A Long History The Instituto Óscar Domínguez de Arte y Cultura Contemporánea (IODACC, now TEA) was first conceptualized thir-teen years ago, in 1995; it was one of the best-articulated cultural projects in the island of Tenerife, with a clear vision for its future. Its original denomination, which referred to Óscar Domínguez, was due to the fact that this painter, a tireless lover of his native region, was one of the strongest promoters of the construction of such a space in the Canary Islands, as well as a tribute to his status as the local artists with the greatest international renown. In 1996, on the occasion of the 100th anni-versary of his birth, his work and life were the subject of a significant homa...