MAC Panamá | Museum of Contemporary Art

This guide to MAC Panama, the Museum of Contemporary Art, traces the fortress-like building's earlier life as the Ancon Lodge, a Masonic temple raised in 1939 by architects James Wright and Gustav Schay for the most important lodge on the Pacific side of the old Canal Zone. It follows what geometry and secrecy meant to the Freemasons who met behind these thick concrete walls, and what happened to the building once the Canal Zone around it emptied out in the 1980s. You'll hear how two Panamanian women, Coqui Calderon and Graciela de Eleta, took out a loan in 1983 to buy the abandoned temple. Stand in what once required a password, and note how little of that secrecy the walls still keep.