Chilean architect Sergio Larraín García-Moreno, an avant-gardist in the field of urban design in Santiago, studied in Europe during his youth and upon his return, traveled throughout the Americas. He was awed by the variety of landscapes: the impenetrable and humid Amazon jungle; the arid deserts and rainforests; the cold Pacific coast and the warm waters of the Atlantic. However, it was the cultural diversity that most surprised him.

In spite of the European conquest, the aboriginal cultures, inheritors of the splendid past of the Americas, had not disappeared. He was astonished to find that an important part of global agriculture depended on corn and potatoes, crops that were produced and bequeathed to humanity by the indigenous peoples of the Americas; that 3,000 years ago the ancient Olmecs dominated abstract mathematical concepts such as zero, were well initiated in astronomy and had developed a system of writing. Sergio Larraín felt that the art of these peoples contained a hidden message of humanity, of a cultural uniqueness that had to be recovered.

It was then that he was seized by a passion to understand these cultures, and so began collecting their works of art. Over a period of fifty years, he selected the most varied pre-Columbian objects using one basic criterion: that their aesthetic quality should produce an emotion similar to that described by Dürer when a piece of Mexican jewelry he saw at the court of Flanders overwhelmed him with awe. Consequently, he collected a set of exceptional pieces, representing indigenous American art in all its variety. It was neither the complex technical knowledge, nor the heterogeneous aboriginal economies that attracted the collector, but that far more profound and spiritual message of art.
Sergio Larraín García-Moreno died on June 27th, 1999.