The CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, home to a few surprises, such as a branch of Starbucks where baristas definitely do not ask names, and a museum of espionage that have never entered. And those are just the details of which are allowed to speak.
Langley is the center of an empire of espionage which has a budget of billions. Your classified intelligence operatives counting is tasked with, among other things, sabotage and ISIS waging cyber war, so it is understandable that the agency is somewhat closed.
However, few people know that the headquarters are home to one of the galleries of the world's most enigmatic art.
Among his collection of works of art with a military theme and espionage (imagine scenes soft focus planes flying over foreign lands), the CIA has a cache of 29 abstract paintings ... paintings that the agency says are used in training intelligence analysts. The CIA states that these are valuable works that belonged to a school semioculta mid-twentieth century artists living in Washington, but the identities of many of the art works remain unknown.
Collection boxes Melzac, recreated by Joby Barron for the exhibition "Chasing Justice".
The artist Joby Barron has spent seven years wondering why the CIA is reluctant to talk much about all the paintings that adorn the walls. During her research, she says the agency has not sent a single image that would identify the pictures.
"My interest in the project began in 2008," said Barron, 42, e-mail. "I found a picture of Taryn Simon in his series 'American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar'. The photo was of two abstract paintings at the headquarters of the CIA in Langley, Virginia. I was instantly intrigued. Why the CIA had these works? I wondered what other works of art could have and whether they were available to the public ".
Today, she can tell you this: in 1968, the breeder of racehorses and art collector Melzac Vincent, who is best remembered for a famous fight in a gallery rather than being knowledgeable about the secret talks held art- with agency administrators about paying your collection.
Melzac was the wealthy owner of a number of art schools and by the end of the 70, had what was arguably the most important private collection of works by the group "Washington Color School". These works with blocky, geometric and often similar to a corporate logo among them pieces by the famous American artists Gene Davis, and Robert W. Norman Bluhm Newmann- have been in the collection of the agency for nearly 50 years.
Barron was soon in the role of a counterspy - "one that was still too obvious," he says in an attempt to make great strides from scraps of information.
An attorney who met at a party told her that she could submit an application under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA, by its acronym in English), and the agency would be required to share information about his art collection
However, that would not be so simple:
" It looks like a kind of game of cat and mouse, as most of the time, the CIA informed me that my inquiries do not request government records themselves , or they were too broad or vague and did not meet the requirements of an application under the FOIA and for these reasons , the art records of the CIA, or requests to receive a list of paintings and photographs from the collection of Melzac had been denied , "he says .
Barron are recreations of three quarters of the size, and its exhibition also contains details of his mission to uncover details about the originals.
In 2014 , finally it received nearly 100 pages of partially edited information, which gave details of the first meeting of the agency Melzac , and other ambiguous , sometimes full pages
